Chapter 01 — Today in music
On a day like today May 24
1941
Bob Dylan is born: the day Duluth gave rock a Nobel Prize
On May 24, 1941, Robert Zimmerman was born in Duluth, Minnesota — the man who, as Bob Dylan, would raise popular song to literary rank. He changed the rules at least three times: with protest folk, with the electrification of 1965, and with every reinvention after that. The 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature merely confirmed what his records had been saying for sixty years.
Bob Dylan
1974
Duke Ellington dies, the aristocrat who made jazz high architecture
On May 24, 1974, Duke Ellington died in New York at 75. For half a century he led America's most sophisticated orchestra and composed thousands of pieces that erased the border between jazz and concert music. His harmonic elegance fed every genre that followed: from soul to progressive rock, all of them owe him vocabulary.
Duke Ellington
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