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I have recently made it a habit of dusting off long-forgotten works of great musical artists. Those works that, for one reason or another, never were distributed or heard by very many humans. Most of the time, there is a reason such works were marginalized. They are often terrible. Perhaps they were recorded illegally, a rogue recording for another label during an era where record labels were the Leviathan, and artists were just one of those little dudes inside its belly.
The Leviathan, and a tortured analogy.
Or perhaps the discovery of the recording would so sully the artist's reputation as to render it irredeemable.
The live bootleg of Louis Armstrong's 1968 Holiday Concert at Yankee Stadium is such a recording. This recording not only captures the once great jazzman in a disgusting, booze-fueled stupor, it is said to be one of the few documented instances that he fails to pick up his signature horn, the trumpet. He leaves most of the musicianship to a hastily assembled, amateurish group of Harlem and South Bronx church musicians. These poor, forgotten souls do their best to push through Armstrong's arrhythmic scat singing, slurred monologues and even a cataclysmic foray into the electric guitar ("Like-uh-duh Jimi Hendrix", Armstrong belched), but the performance is an unmitigated catastrophe on every level. "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear" is perhaps the recording's low moment, with Armstrong forgetting the words mid-song, proclaiming "Ain't nobody like this song, 'It Came Upon a Midnight What?", and coercing the stunned musicians into playing a heavily derivative blues riff while Armstrong vomited out an inebriated ode to Christmas in New York City.
An early sign of things to come. Armstrong with a Chinese Moon Guitar.
The concert came to an abrupt, and chaotic, halt after Armstrong suddenly ended the evening after just five songs (and just under nine minutes of stage time) with the as-yet unwritten "Feliz Navidad". A full-scale riot ensued, and Armstrong was rushed off stage by the Yankee Stadium security team before any harm could come to him. The damage, though, was done. The public address announcer pleaded with the angered crowd: "That's it, that's it".
The full story behind this mind-bogglingly poor performance may never be known; the masters were apparently eradicated on Armstrong's orders minutes after the show ended, and local news outlets refused to report on the monstrosity out of respect for the once-great performer. But this document tells you all you need to know; on that night in 1968, Armstrong was out of his goddamn mind. Listen at the Soundcloud link above, if you dare.