Giving Up The Ghost

Giving Up The Ghost
by Robert Walter's 20th Congress



By Jan P. Dennis "Longboard jazzer"
. . . one is almost tempted to say the "ur-funk."

What if one could produce the essence of funk? What would it sound like? My own view, arrived at through not a little struggle, is that it would sound exactly like Robert Walter's 20th Congress disc, Giving up the Ghost.

When I say "not a little struggle," I'm confessing a ham-handedness toward this music that borders on incomprehensible. Bottom line: I don't generally like funk. It's not the music I would naturally gravitate toward. More than that: It's music I would normally avoid.

Nevertheless, intrepid sampler of varieties of musical soundscapes that I am, I felt obligated to explore funk. Yes, I'd heard Karl Denson, the Greyboy Allstars, and some others. But I'd never seemed to fully connect. And, truth to tell, I didn't initially with this disc either. I bought it, listened to it, disdained it, set it on the shelf, and only came back to it just recently.

And was blown away by it.

Whereas I just couldn't access its pure funkadelic grooves the first several listens, somehow, serendipitously, I COULD when I came back to it. Maybe I had a few too many. Maybe I'd slipped into some maudlin judgment-suspension mode. (Yes, I'd had a few too many.)

But I really don't think that was it. By some near-miracle of suspended suspicion, I'd achieved proper hermeneutic access: I could listen to this marvelous music without prejudice, without preconditioned bias. And I thereby discovered its magnificence.

Make no mistake. Robert Walter is a man who knows his antecedents: Melvin Sparks, Fred Wesley, and Mike Clark. That he has transmuted their collective influence into something uniquely and brilliantly his own proves his worth as the reigning funkmeister.

Ignore at your peril.

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