Igor Nazaruk - Forest is Awaken - Jazz Compositions... 1985

This is the aforementioned masterpiece I would like to hear on my last day on earth, in company with my family of course...
Listening to this, I am reminded why I spent a lifetime pursuing artistic beauty, the greatest works humans could create with creativity and intelligence.  I think it would make anyone a million times more sad to leave a world with beauty such as this, even though they are assured of a heaven.  As I say to my wife about music, heaven could not possibly contain more beauty than this.  In an old movie from the 70s that no one I'm sure remembers anymore, The Other Side of the Mountain, Jill's last words to the camera go something like this, "I feel so grateful to have met something or someone that saying goodbye to is so damned hard".
I love the fact the music moves among so many different styles, jazz, orchestral, chamber, fusion, constantly changing, every few minutes there is new interest with new textures, new inventions.  And of course, the build to the climax is worthy of stravinsky, and rare to hear in a jazz composition, but befitting the sylvan theme.  It amazes me to think how much time he would have spent on this composition-- a year, a few years off and on? Or was he so inspired, he churned it out in a few weeks with coffee and vodka, filled with the divine spirit of creativity?  But I know he put his blood, sweat, and tears into it, you can hear a whole lifetime pass before your eyes, like at the end of 2001 A Space Odyssey, it's like a flashback through an entire existence in one side of a record.  The one detraction is of course side 1, which comprises some rather boring piano solo compositions, though well-titled, the mind really drifts after the first minute.  Is the side 2 his magnum and only opus?   I don't know, I would love to know more.

Credits
I. Nazaruk - Keyboards
S. Gurbeloshvili - Saxes
M. Kochetkov - Guitar
A. Isplatovsky - Bass
A. Chernyshev - Drums

With the USSR Goskino Symphony Orchestra, Wind Group and Strings