I was talking to one of the fellas playing his '70s rock collection of LPs on his radio time slot last week and we were swapping stories about looking for certain out-of-print discs. I told him about searching for a great jazz blues suite album for a number of years. It's called "The Blues Is Everybody's Business" by composer and leader Manny Albam and features a full band and strings with some of that period's greatest musicians on board. It was the absolute jazz favorite of both my father and I.

However, while I was over in Africa, somehow this LP managed to develop some severe scratches that almost rendered it unusable. An added problem was that the LP was done on the long-defunct Coral record label and I'd not been able to find anyone who had picked up their library of music. I had even talked to musicians who were part of the ensemble on this LP. They had no clue where to find it. Hence the search for a replacement.

When I got back to my office that day, I did a casual search on Ebay (having done this before a number of times before) and voila! To my stunned amazement, the album comes up on the screen, with one LP copy available for a starting bid of $9.95.

I'm glad to tell you all that I won the bid for $10.45 and this baby is on the way. It is supposedly in mint condition and with other LPs still in my collection, I'm getting ready to convert them to digital sound so they can be burned onto CDs.

This has been a good week.