Mal Waldron - Candy Girl (2025 Strut Records Reissue Vinyl LP)

Mal Waldron - Candy Girl | Vinyl LP - 2025 Strut Records Reissue (STRUT295LP, remastered by The Carvery, pressed at Pallas)

• A lost 1975 session recorded spontaneously at Parisound Studio in Courbevoie, Paris with core members of the Lafayette Afro Rock Band; originally pressed on the Calumet label in reportedly no more than twenty copies, never issued with a cover
  
• Five tracks, from the low-slung vamp of "Home Again" through the nine-minute "Red Match Box" to "Dedication to Brahms," where Waldron works through Brahms's Third Symphony as a spare jazz meditation
• Strut Records STRUT295LP; remastered by The Carvery; new liner notes by Francis Gooding; replica Calumet label artwork; pressed at Schallplattenfabrik Pallas; released September 2025

Mal Waldron left the United States in the 1960s and did not return. After a serious breakdown in 1963 — following years as Billie Holiday's accompanist and an active career on the New York scene — he rebuilt himself in Europe and Japan, arriving eventually at a leaner, harder approach: modal repetition, locked rhythms, long sustained figures. By 1975, when he walked into Pierre Jaubert's Parisound Studio in Courbevoie, that transformation was complete.

Jaubert's studio had become a hub for two worlds that rarely collided — avant-garde jazz, with sessions by Archie Shepp, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Steve Lacy passing through, and the American funk of the Lafayette Afro Rock Band, who had settled in Paris and whose grooves were destined to be pulled apart by hip-hop producers for decades. Waldron recorded with three of the Lafayette's core members: Lafayette Hudson on bass, Donny Donable on drums and Frank Abel on keyboards. The session was unplanned. What came out was five tracks ranging from modal funk to jazz ballad to a spare deconstruction of Brahms's Third Symphony.

The original Calumet pressing ran to perhaps twenty copies and had no cover. Pierre Jaubert produced. This Strut reissue was remastered by The Carvery from the original tapes, with new liner notes by Francis Gooding and replica Calumet label artwork. Pressed at Pallas in Germany.