Two Totems of the Trumpet

nyone's short list of jau greats would have to include Louis

Armstrong and Miles Davis, two seminal trumpeters who

have been obsessions for Ricky Riccardi and Michael

Conklin, alumni of the esteemed master's degree in jau history

and research at Rutgers- Newark who recently made significant
contributions to appreciating the two artists' later careers. Floored
by the music of Armstrong at age 15, Riccardi GSN'05, today an
archivist at the Louis Armstrong House Museum at Queens College,
spent 15 years researching, blogging, and ultimately writing What

a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong's Later Years

(Pantheon, 2011), which stemmed from his thesis, written under

the tutelage of professor Lewis Porter.
Conklin UCNB'01 , GSN'07, a professor at The College of New
Jersey and Brookdale Community College, compiled the discography for the book The Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis

Quintet, 1965-68 (Oxford University Press, 2011), which examines Davis's "Second Quintet" of the mid-1960s. The band's studio recordings made, Conklin says, "a profound contribution to
improvisational strategies, jau composition, and mediation
between mainstream and avant-garde jazz. The fact that Davis
was such an innovator in multiple styles of jau says so much
about his creative spirit." Additional Conklin essays about jazz
history will appear in the second edition of The Grove Dictionary

of American Music (Oxford University Press) in the spring.

Alumni Ricky Riccardi and Michael Conklin recently

contributed to the lore of two jau greats, louis
Armstrong. top, and Miles Davis, seen here in 1971 and
1968, by writing definitive accounts of pivotal phases
in their brilliant musical careers.