Candy Girl

It’s the centennial of pianist Mal Waldron and he may be having a moment. He factored prominently in jazz writer Ben Ratliff’s recent Run the Song, in a well-read essay, pianist Matthew Shipp considered him a cornerstone figure in the “Black Mystery School Pianists” tradition, and the NYT recently highlighted him in their 5 Minutes That Will Make You Love… series. Since his days as a house player at Prestige in the late 1950s, Mal Waldron had an enviously long recording career, with upwards of 1300 dates. And now his rarest release is also finally seeing a reissue. 

Candy Girl was always an enigma in Waldron’s catalog, a blip in 1975 and long since out of print. At times, it was mistaken for Parisian funk band Lafayette Afro Rock Band, as members of that band served as his backing band. It’s a rare glimpse of Waldron on Fender Rhodes, with Frank Abel on clavinet. It makes for delirious keyboard salvos between the two, Waldron delectably entangled with these loose funk, Afro-indebted rhythms. The band is blaxploitation-tight on “Home Again,” but loose and scattered as a busted pinata on “Candy Girl.” The resultant music is a casual one-off, but a fascinating one.