I Love to Love: An EP Selection

Released October 6, 2017 via Vinyl Passion, I Love to Love: An EP Selection gathers fourteen tracks Nina Simone first issued across four early EPs, cut using DMM and pressed to a single 180g LP. Side A opens with four songs from the I Love to Love EP on Colpix, "Forbidden Fruit" and "Rags and Old Iron" among them, and three from The Intimate Nina Simone on Parlophone, including "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands" and "African Mailman." Side B carries three tracks from the My Baby Just Cares for Me EP, then four from Jazz As Played in an Exclusive Side Street Club on Bethlehem, the label that issued her debut album.

This is Simone before the protest songs: a conservatory-trained pianist working through a jazz club's book. She threads Bach-style counterpoint through "Love Me or Leave Me," lets her voice settle dark and unhurried on "I Loves You Porgy," her first US Top 20 hit, and swings through Tadd Dameron's instrumental "Good Bait." "My Baby Just Cares for Me," first cut in 1957, found a second life in 1987, when a Chanel No. 5 commercial sent it into the UK Top 5 and made it permanent.

European 180g pressing, catalogue VP 90022, graded Near Mint, unsealed.