MAL WALDRON
The Cool World Soundtrack
[no label 1CD]

The Cool World was a Shirley Clark film made in 1964 about hookers, junkies, rumbles and jazz. It’s a coming of age film. Back then the soundtrack of cool, before the dawning of British pop, was jazz.

The film was shot in Harlem and the man with the horn was Dizzy Gillespie. Dizzy and his band with Yusef Lateef, Aaron Bell, Arthur Taylor and Mal Waldron, played Waldron’s original compositions which were used for the film. But when the soundtrack surfaced in mid-1964 it was slightly different. For a start, the entire soundtrack was rerecorded for release with more or less the same tunes but attributed to Dizzy Gillespie with another band [James Moody, Kenny Barron, Chris White and Rudy Collins]. The original Waldron soundtrack has been lost for decades.

Fortunately, a test pressing on acetate survived and we present what are unpolished takes of the Waldron tunes. Track titles are the cues from the recording booth with the corresponding titles from Gillespie’s album in brackets. There are six tracks here not found on the official CD release. If you are interested in the Gillespie version, it is available on CD with the bonus of Dizzy Goes Hollywood.

For a very limited time only, you can download these tracks in the lossy MP3 format below.

Tracks 3, 5, , 7, 11, 15 and 16 are not found on the official soundtrack. The other tracks are all played by a completely different band for the movie’s soundtrack and this version has never been released for sale.

Click on the highlighted tracks to download the MP3

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