Looking over Bob Dylan's Chronicles again, I'm nonplussed by the story of Dylan singing "The Water Is Wide" one night in the Village with ... Cecil Taylor at the piano. I don't suppose there's any tape of this? Better that there isn't, so the imagination can run free. "Cecil could play regular piano if he wanted to," Dylan laconically observes (p. 74).... Herb Levy writes in to point out that Tom Wilson, Dylan's producer in 1964 and 1965, also produced Taylor's debut album, Jazz Advance (not to mention Sun Ra, Frank Zappa, and the Velvet Underground). Levy provides a link to a Nat Hentoff piece on Chronicles, which highlights another excellent jazz moment in the book — Dylan meets Thelonious Monk and identifies himself as a folksinger, to which Monk repies, "We all play folk music." Which reminds me of what Edward Elgar said when the likes of Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams started insisting that English composers should use native folk tunes: "I am folk music."
