IMPEX 2-LPs IMP-6035-1: Patricia Barber - Cafe Blue - 2020 US 1STEP 45rpm SEALED

$

250

****Welcome to our listing, thanks very much for looking!

****See our own website! We have lots of out of print LPs and CDs! Find us on the web at -

                 hearthedifference.net

****Please see our other listings - new items added daily!

****Shipping cost is only an estimate - it depends on the actual weight and size of the package as well as the service required. We do not profit from shipping costs, so if we overcharge, we will refund the difference back to you. It's always best to wait for our invoice before paying for your item. We will combine shipping for multiple items purchased.

Background -

TAS Super LP List! Special Merit: Informal
TONE's 2020 Product Of The Year - Recording!
Michael Fremer Rated 10/11 Music, 10/11 Sonics!
1STEP Process 180g 45rpm Double LP Pressed on VR900-Supreme Vinyl!
Cut From Original Analog Work Masters by Kevin Gray at CoHearent Audio!
Strictly Limited To 5000 Numbered Pressings!

Patricia Barber has always been an artist's artist, harnessing a restless imagination and an intellectualized curiosity to create visionary jazz that breaks boundaries and reorders perceptions. She serves the chase: the unexpected musical note. The irreplaceable word. The irregular beating heart of jazz.

And Café Blue is the album that best personifies her genius. Spare, turbulent, quirky, and slyly humorous, there is no other jazz masterwork quite like it.

For the first collaboration with this musical vanguard, Impex's 1STEP is exclusively cut from original analog work masters and cut by Kevin Gray at CoHearent Audio. The stunning fidelity, breathtaking dynamics and startling spacial realism surpass every other edition of this breakthrough album.

The 1STEP Process: 
The Impex 1STEP process relies on short, tightly-controlled runs that require a new lacquer after each 500 pressings. This unforgiving format has the lacquer skipping the regular father-mother process, going right to a single convert and then pressing. Though this dramatically increases mastering and production costs, it also assures each run is more consistent from disc to disc, with less noise, clearer details and deeper bass.

Reducing production complexity to just a single "convert" disc between the lacquer and the press greatly improves groove integrity, diminishes non-fill anomalies and increases signal integrity from the master tape to your system.

Two 180-gram 45-rpm LPs, pressed on VR900-SUPREME VINYL, and a deluxe booklet are packaged in a heavy-duty 3-sleeve jacket. The jacket is then placed in a linen-wrapped slip case that protects your investment and brings a cool retro-modern look to your shelves. Strictly limited to 5,000 numbered pressings!

"A long serious asthma attack had sidelined me for an entire year before and during the time I wrote the music for Café Blue. In a repeat of so many childhood episodes of being sick, exiled, looking out the window at other kids playing, coughing up mucus at my mother's insistence, crying myself to sleep, doing breathing exercises into an inhalation meter given to me by the hospital to increase my lung capacity, there I was again at 37 years old, very sick. My existence centered around the inhalation meter which showed a dangerously low number. Over the course of that year, I was able to increase my lung capacity, day by day, incrementally, from a reading of 'almost dead' to a normal, even robust lung capacity. But it took a full year, all my savings, and extreme patience to bring myself back to the world of the living.

Toward the end of that year, feeling better, I started working again with music, my great love. At the Gold Star Sardine Bar, Bill Allen, the owner, had insisted that I sing songs exclusively from the classic American Songbook. My mother had taught me all of these songs, but I really learned them well during the 9 years of 6 nights a week at the Gold Star. (The smoke from the club also made me sick, as they had cigarettes on the tables.) Intimate knowledge of this song library gave me access to harmony, lyrics, secrets to what can make a song work. And like many other singers of the era, I was frustrated that there was no quality contemporary song repertoire. Having time on my hands, I decided to give songwriting a try. Pretty quickly I realized I had a talent for it. The emotion you hear in the songs on Café Blue is some combination of my sadness at being imprisoned, my love for music and life, and my joy in seeing light at the end of the tunnel." - P.B., December 2019

The only way to get closer to Ms. Barber is to pull up a chair at one of her performances... If you?'re a mega-fan, you want this one. From a sheer recording standpoint, this is the closest to the sound quality the reel to reel guys are gushing about. And collectors loving the tactile aspect will appreciate a jacket and box done to the same standard. - Jeff Dorgay, TONEAudio, 2020 Product of the Year Award Winnner - Recording

Songs of sickness, loss, death-acceptance, being overwhelmed and suicide have never sounded so good or been so well packaged. So, yes, we do need yet another café blue and honestly, even if you already have a copy (especially the original pressing, or the Mo-Fi, which on some songs like 'Ode to Billy Joe' sound as if Barber's voice was out of phase and almost 'canceled out' - never mind it was sourced from the original inferior mix) and love the music and the sound, you too need another copy. This one. - Michael Fremer, Analog Planet, Music 10/11, Sound 10/11

Bottom line, I was absolutely floored by the sound quality. First off, my copy was perfectly flat and extremely quiet. Compared to the MFSL 45 RPM, it was like night and day, and it did make a significant difference. Instruments and vocals just seemed to explode from a deep black background. I have ten or more One Step releases, and this sets a new standard for these variables. Low end sound quality exceeded that of the MFSL SACD. The drums on 'Too Rich For My Blood' were now properly unleashed and almost physically startling. Acoustic bass on 'Ode To Billy Joe' had tremendous depth and separation. Very exciting! There was something that felt just right about all of this. You know it when you hear it. For a digital recording, I'm not sure how much better the mids could be. Vocals seemed to be more properly rounded and clearly defined - neither set too far back or in your face. On 'What a Shame,' Patricia's smoky voice was fully fleshed out with a sense of ease and palpability that most digital and analog sources can only dream about. There is a  bunch of snare on this recording. Instead of the clinical hardness and grain that was even more apparent after multiple comparisons, we now have a proper golden sheen to the splash of the high hats, and a woodiness to the drum sticks that make you feel like this is very close to the real thing. You get the power and dynamics on percussion that were only hinted at before. As you can tell, I was very impressed by the sound quality of this pressing... All in all, this is the real deal. For audiophiles seeking out the very best when it comes to visceral involvement and musical satisfaction, the IMPEX 1-Step Café Blue is a true delight. For those adding to their One Step collection or for others looking for an opportunity to experience this pressing technology for the first time, I strongly recommend that you check this one out. - Robert S. Youman, Positive Feedback

Features:
• Limited to Two Copies Per Customer
• Strictly limited to 5000 numbered pressings
• 1STEP Process
• 45rpm 180 Gram Vinyl
• Double LP
• Pressed on VR900-Supreme Vinyl
• Exclusively cut from the original analog work masters
• Cut by Kevin Gray at CoHearent Audio
• Packaged in a heavy-duty 3-sleeve jacket
• Cool retro-modern linen-wrapped slip case
• Deluxe booklet featuring a brand-new note from Patricia Barber
Musicians:
Patricia Barber - piano, vocals
John McLean - guitars
Michael Arnopol - bass
Mark Walker - drums, percussion, body parts

Patricia Barber, who is both a fine keyboardist and an atmospheric singer, contributes roughly half of the material to her debut. Her dark voice and the generally esoteric program takes awhile to get used to (listeners will have to be patient), but after two or three listens, this thought-provoking and rather moody set becomes more accessible. The music ranges style wise from sophisticated pop sensitivities to the avant-garde and even touches of minimalism, while not fitting securely into any category. Barber gives a new slant to "The Thrill Is Gone," "Ode to Billy Joe," and even "A Taste of Honey," and her vocals are all quite haunting and contemporary. An added plus to this unusual music is adventurous guitarist John McLean. - Scott Yanow

Award-winning jazz pianist, singer, and songwriter Patricia Barber's unique style and unusual voice make her an easy artist to distinguish. Her playing and singing are almost iconoclastically inventive, inhabiting a terrain inside and outside a musical slipstream that exists between post-bop, pop, classical music, cabaret song, and avant-garde, while being performed -- in studio and on-stage -- with a smoky, dreamy, yet imposing, mercurial presence. Her insistence on writing her own material (and adapting songs from the pop world that suit her particular aesthetic) makes her difficult to categorize. Her unwillingness to play music business promotional games resulted in having her work evaluated by critics on its own terms. She is a tireless performer who has, in addition to touring the globe, played a standing residency at Chicago's famous jazz room, the Green Mill, for many years. Early albums such as A Distortion of Love and Cafe Blue initially resonated with European listeners, though their artistic appeal ultimately reached U.S. college campuses during the '90s and put her on the jazz charts. During her years with Blue Note -- 2000 through 2008 -- she issued wildly diverse recordings such as Verse, which reflected intersections between jazz and literature with a quirky accessibility that won her a Guggenheim fellowship for composition. Later, Mythologies, a song cycle based on Ovid's Metamorphosis, won over an entirely new breed of listeners for its embrace and ultimate transgression of art song. She has always respectfully refused to conform to conventional vocal jazz idioms and, in her phrasing and sense of "stretched" time, reveals an affinity for Nina Simone and Joni Mitchell more than canonical sources.

The daughter of Floyd "Shim" Barber and a blues vocalist, she had all but rejected the idea of becoming a  jazz musician, but found herself drawn to the performing world after college. When she returned to Chicago, she was trashed by the local critics, and only after winning a five-day-a-week gig at the intimate Gold Star Sardine Bar and releasing her first album on her own Floyd label (1989's Split) did the tide begin to turn for her. She signed a contract with Verve and released A Distortion of Love in 1992, which brought her some critical attention and earned her a national audience, but the big-label experience was trying for her, and she sought a place where she could have more creative control. Her next two albums, 1994's Café Blue and 1998's Modern Cool, were issued by the tiny local label Premonition.

The label was purchased by Blue Note in 1998, and the organization put some marketing muscle behind Barber, helping to bolster the international reputation she had already begun to earn. Blue Note released Companion in 1999, intended to act as her introduction to a wider audience -- the album reprised much of her popular material and was recorded live at Chicago's Green Mill, a historic jazz club where Barber had been performing weekly for several years. 2000's Night Club took her back into a studio setting, but still featured many of the inventive interpretations that had distinguished her work in the past. Barber issued her edgy, critically acclaimed Verse on the Blue Note label in 2002. She won a Guggenheim in March of 2003 to create a song cycle based on Ovid's Metamorphoses. Her concert set Live: A Fortnight in Paris was issued on the label in 2004, consisting of five originals, five covers, and two brand new songs. Mythologies, based on Ovid's poems, followed in 2006. A year later, the anthology The Premonition Years: 1992-2002 appeared, detailing most of Barber's early releases. Barber took a break from her original material and delivered the jazz standards studio album The Cole Porter Mix in 2008. She toured in support of the album and continued to play festivals along with her Monday night Green Mill gig at home in Chicago. She continued writing, and tried out her new material at the club, using a revolving cast of players -- many of whom were among the city's younger generation. Barber signed to Concord in 2012. Smash, her debut offering for the label, was released in January of 2013. She toured Europe with her quartet, as well as the U.S., and Asia, before re-settling into her residency at the Green Mill. During this period, she conceived and wrote another art song cycle. In 2015, Barber toured "Angels, Birds, and I" with Renée Fleming. The following year she performed it at Chicago's Harris Theater to open the prestigious Ear Taxi New Music Festival. In 2018, she undertook an ArtistShare crowd-funding project and recorded it. The cycle "Angels, Birds, and I..." was recorded in juxtaposition with unique arrangements of Great American Songbook tunes and released as Higher in the spring of 2019. - Stacia Proefrock

Release date: December 2020

• IMPEX Records 2-LP (1-STEP) Item - item is FACTORY SEALED

• Made in the USA

• Pressing is in STEREO, cut at 45rpm
  

• Numbered set # 2482 out of 5000 worldwide
  

• Limited Edition

• Record Catalog Number: IMP 6035-1

This listing is for a rare 1-STEP, 2xLPs Deluxe Box Set title - a FACTORY SEALED and in MINT overall condition. The box set was PRESSED and ISSUED by IMPEX Records and is a highly collectible title -

Patricia Barber

2-LP Boxed Set Title -

Cafe Blue

CONDITION Details:

The Outer Box Jacket, Inserts, and LPs are assumed to be in Mint condition. The jacket is completely intact, with NO seam splits, no tears in the plastic - perfect! This item is FACTORY SEALED. See our pictures with this listing for more detail as they are of the actual item we are offering (except for the first picture). 

A Short Note About LP GRADING -

• Mint = Only used for sealed items.
• Near Mint = Virtually flawless in every way.
• Near Mint Minus = Item has some minor imperfections, some audible.
• Excellent = Item obviously played and enjoyed with some noise.
• Very Good Plus = Many more imperfections which are noticeable and obtrusive.

Always properly clean your LPs before playing them - even new, sealed titles!

The LP is an audiophile quality pressing (any collector of fine MFSL, half speeds, direct to discs, Japanese/UK pressings etc., can attest to the difference a quality pressing can make to an audio system).

Do not let this rarity slip by!