Wayman Tisdale - "The Fonk Record"

Following an outstanding career at the University of Oklahoma - one which saw his number retired and the national award for best freshman named after him - and a gold medal in the 1984 Olympics, Wayman Tisdale was taken with the second pick in the 1985 NBA Draft. Though his professional career was marked by a number of excellent seasons, Tisdale remained as widely known for his delightful personality and surprising virtuosity on the bass guitar as his performance on-court, and he actually retired early in 1997 to focus on his music. Unfortunately for some of the fans the Tiz made in the NBA, he chose to make his career in smooth jazz. Though his music was always well-played and immaculately produced, it nonetheless was prone to much of the generic feel endemic to the genre, and Tisdale may thus have never enjoyed the full commercial success his extramusical celebrity should have afforded him. In 2007, to the dismay of basketball fans nationwide, Tisdale was diagnosed with cancer that would remain an issue for the rest of his life and lead to the partial amputation of his right leg the following year. He carried on through his illness with characteristic grace, and even founded the Wayman Tisdale Foundation to raise funds for fellow amputees without enough money for prosthetic limbs. However, he died suddenly in May 2009, an abrupt end that not only robbed the world of an inspiring, gentle spirit, but even worse, seemingly took him without a chance to say goodbye. The October 2010 release of The Fonk Record therefore came as an enormous surprise. For one thing, it contained recordings made gradually over the course of 12 years, without any outside attention. It was also naturally strange to hear Tisdale more than a year after his death, not only on the bass, but even singing. Most disorienting of all, though, was that the album's name turned out to accurately describe its contents: it really is nothing less than an honest-to-god funk album, and one that could have been pulled out of a Bootsy Collins time capsule, at that.

Even without the added novelty of Wayman Tisdale releasing an album like The Fonk Record, it would have been odd to find anyone recording this kind of music in 2010. After all, by most any account, though it lived on in derivative forms, the funk proper had died by the early 80s: P-Funk ran out of gas, James Brown was reduced to a used carbon copy of himself, and Sly Stone literally disappeared into a tear in the fabric of time and space. Yet upon investigation, Tisdale's move makes perfect sense. Funk had been born in the context of a sad state of affairs for black Americans in the late 60s and early 70s, when the choice for socially concerned black popular musicians was either to produce a soul-searching affair like What's Going On or simply to forge ahead and (admittedly, anachronistically) Tear the Roof Off the Sucker. In the face of life-threatening - and, according to subsequent interviews with his widow, painfully debilitating - illness, Tiz, like so many of his bass forebears, turned to the fountain of funk as a source of spiritual comfort. It's as much a testament to his strength of character as his musicianship that The Fonk Record genuinely manages to be as good as the story behind it would make his fans hope. Perhaps Tisdale's wisest decision was to remain true to the genre and ensure that the music never feels overly sentimental. So though there are some moments rendered more meaningful by circumstance - when Tiz sings "there ain't never gonna be another jam like this" on his George Clinton duet "This Fonk Is 4U," or when his bandmates transform the breakup ballad "Been Here Before" into a goodbye to Wayman - the album remains, first and by far foremost, an excuse to simply have a great fucking time. It's the most appropriate goodbye conceivable, and convincing proof that he was as gifted a musician as he was a basketball player or a human being.