Once in a while, I wake up in the morning remembering an LP album I used to have that I haven't replaced with a CD. It happened with Eric Schoenberg, it happened with Limbus 4, it happened with Ash Ra Tempel.
Monday it happened with Rodion Azarkhin.
Azarkhin (1931-2007) was a Russian classical double bassist virtuoso who released a few things on Melodiya but wasn't well known in the West. I'd had one of the Angel Records reissues of Melodiya releases with a selection of pieces played by him. Checking Discogs.org that LP has never been reissued on CD (of course), but there were two other CDs of "favorites by Rodion Azarkhin." Both were out of print. Volume 1 had a copy available on Amazon for $898.87, but volume 2 was nowhere to be found. I checked my usual online sources. Nothing.
I started going farther afield. I looked for illegal downloads. Nothing. I know of a couple stores that sell semi(?)-legal downloads from albums they themselves have ripped to storage. The first one was nada. The second one, bingo -- they had both CDs.
Bought, downloaded, burned. Made a cover, and in so doing, discovered the contents of the second CD duplicated the long-ago LP I was trying to replace, albeit with different track titles. Success!
And you know what? One of the "showpieces" Rodion performs is "Flight of the Bumblebee" on the doublebass -- played even faster than the video above. He does it in 1:05.
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