Posted by sigh
One of the byproducts of living long is losing others, a symptom of life that gets significantly more common with age. In February of 2025 I received the shocking news that my friend Kurt Walther had died suddenly of a heart attack. As I understand it, when it happened he’d been sitting in the kitchen with a guitar in his lap.
So fitting.
Kurt was a lot of things; father, husband, friend, teacher, guru. He was funny, he had manic energy, and his overactive, careening mind definitely landed somewhere on the genius spectrum. But for all that I think the first word most people would use to describe Kurt would be “musician”. Specifically, he was a bass player, though his musical abilities seemed to transfer easily to whatever instrument he had on hand.
I first met Kurt when I began teaching at the Ottawa Folklore Centre. He was already a fixture there when I started, and when the place closed its doors a dozen or more years later Kurt was still there. By then he was second in seniority; I was fourth.
Over the years I spent a lot of time chatting with Kurt and I can report that I have never met anyone with such a limitless supply of wide-eyed vitality. To talk music theory with Kurt was like talking string theory with Stephen Hawking. He had a musical mind the size of a planet, and it was always interesting to hear him try to squeeze his vast knowledge through such a tiny gap in the front of his face. He was invariably forced to babble; Kurt’s voice simply could not keep up with the information that poured from his mind.
A quick example:
Kurt once told me that every chord contained within it an inherent natural rhythm. Huh? How can a single static chord contain a rhythm? He had to take a couple of runs at it with a lot of arm flapping, but I think I ultimately deciphered what he meant and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t completely make sense. Here ‘goes:
Imagine an A major triad (chord). You have three notes, an A, a C#, and an E. As most musicians know, middle A has a frequency of 440 hertz, which means that when a string (or whatever) vibrates at 440 cycles per second it will produce the note we call A. The C# above it vibrates at 523.25 cycles per second, and the E above that vibrates at 659.255 cycles per second. For this quick explanation I’ll round C# to 520 hertz and I’ll round E to 660.
(But don’t do that in real life. In real life I think you should stick with the real numbers).
If we divide all these numbers by ten we get 44 hertz for the A, 52 hertz for the C#, and 66 hertz for the E. Now imagine slowing these cycles per second down enough until they become beats per minute (BPM). See where this is going? If you were to set three metronomes clicking, one at 44 BPM, another at 52 BPM and the third one at 66 BPM you will end up with a very specific rhythm that is unique to that combination of tempos and hence, unique to that specific chord. If you do this same math with a C chord or a G chord you will end up with completely different numbers and ratios* and hence, each chord has a completely different and unique rhythm.
I was gobsmacked. But then, Kurt was pretty good at getting me gobsmacked.
We only gigged together a handful of times, and it was invariably a case of a young Padawan trying to keep up to a very patient Jedi master. I’ll never forget a pickup gig we did with Jack Grunsky. Grunsky is a Juno award-winning children’s entertainer who specialized in World music, and Kurt and I were backing him at a New Year’s gig at the Corel Centre of all places. In addition to his bass, Kurt had brought along a Nigerian percussion instrument called an udu to our sole rehearsal. An udu is a ceramic gourd of sorts with two holes that are slapped with the palms of your hands producing a sound similar to Indian tablas. Kurt had recently acquired the udu, perhaps as a Christmas present, and Grunsky agreed that it would go well in one of his tunes
Of my memories from that gig (to date my one and only time playing a full-on 20,000 seat arena), the standout image in my mind is Kurt stepping to the front of the stage and fearlessly pounding out an arm-flailing udu solo to the delight of thousands of kids. And man, he looked like he was having so much fun!. I would have been terrified, but not Kurt. He didn’t care that he wasn’t a percussionist. He didn’t care that he had virtually no experience at all playing an udu. All he cared about was making joyous music as purely and strongly as he could, and doing so put a big smile on his face. It’s a glorious memory to have in the old bank.
Kurt’s “Celebration of Life” was scheduled for May 3rd, 2025, which just happened to land on a weekend that I would be in Ottawa for work. When my meeting started wrapping up just before 3pm I figured I was sure to make it in time for the 3:45 service and then, tragically, someone suggested we “run through it again” so I didn’t get out of work until 4pm. I hopped a bus and was in the basement speakeasy bar of St. Brigid’s Centre for the Arts by 4:30. When the service in the upstairs church ended a parade of familiar faces poured down the stairs, many of which I had not seen in years. After an hour of hugs and handshakes the music began.
I mean, of course there was going to be music.
The large room adjoining the brick-and-stone speakeasy held a sizeable stage, with a dozen rows of folding chairs and a snack buffet at the back. Musicians are notorious buffet snackers so I got in line with the rest and got my fill while the getting remained good.
First up was The Angstones, a legendary Ottawa act that included Peter Kiesewalter, Rob Frayne, and of course Kurt, who played guitar (the great John Geggie was the bass player). In addition to being to being the evening’s de facto Master of Ceremonies, the wonderful and understated Vince Halfhide also did a fair amount of guitar playing and he joined The Angstones along with Lindsay Wellman on sax. So it was a reunion minus one plus two, as the long-defunct Angstones played together for the first time in twenty-eight years. They played a half-dozen or more songs – all Kurt compositions – ending with a room-rousing run through of the Flem Ucas classic Cold Cream and Hand Jobs. It was awesome.
It had warmed my heart earlier in the evening when a stranger had broken the ice by asking, “So, are you down with the Flem?” I most certainly was down with the Flem, I’d replied.
(When the shock of Kurt’s passing first slammed me, I immediately reached for his calming, curious, serene and reptilian album Still Life with Frogs, and when I was unable to find my copy I put on the next best thing, Kurt’s snickering romp of adolescent brilliance Bringing Up Flem, released by his little-known and barely-hidden alter ego, Newfoundland’s own Flem Mucas.
Imagine a twelve-year-old musical prodigy who composed an album full of ethereal choral fart jokes and transcendently clever penile pastorales from behind the imagined smokescreen of a chimp-like musical visionary from ’round da bay in rural Newfoundland, and that was Flem Mucas. Except it was actually Kurt, and he was well into his forties when he released the album.
It’s probably enough to say that Flem and his sidemen Ballsy Diackard, Schlonger Pudendopolous, Hyro Bozack, and Giuliano “Sempre Duro” Priapismo present Kurt’s clever compositional nuggets – with titles like You Honed My Bone, I Sport the Rubber Ring, Sploot the Splort, and What Keeps His Sausage Boiled – with vigour, enthusiasm, and serious musical chops. It’s an amazing collection of works; Dr. Demento would eat it up, I’m sure.)
The room was full of friends both old and new. I saw my very good friends Doug and Michelle, and Mike and Megan too. I hadn’t seen Geoffy or Joël in years, and I spoke with a long-ago student of mine who now fronts a band in Montreal called Nurosa. Dylan Watts was there too. He also started lessons with me when he was just a little kid; now he’s one of Ottawa’s best and busiest guitar players. He did a fantastic job sitting in with Brian Dubbeldam, who I haven’t seen in so long that I almost didn’t recognize him. Oh Brian still looks exactly the same as ever, but I totally didn’t recognize his newly-developed and super-great gypsy jazz chops. He did a mini-set with his musical buddy (whom I don’t know) along with Dylan and John Geggie on bass, and it was great.
Victor Nesrallah played, someone I didn’t know recited one of Kurt’s brilliant rhymes-of-an-eight-year-old, and Kurt’s four daughters even got up and did a song together. I’m sure Kurt would have been very moved.
Probably the most beautiful moment of the night went to Andrea Karam, who sang a gorgeous, heart-wrenching number accompanied by her Fun Guys and the incredible Lynn Miles. I don’t recall the song’s title, but it was a goose bumper, for sure.
And incredibly, for all the great players that took the stage, there were tons of great players there who didn’t play. And lots of non-players and pockets of people I didn’t know too, for Kurt had lived a remarkably diverse life. He was raised by a herpetologist; he once told me that his childhood was spent wading through swamps and heating up dead rats in the microwave for the house snakes. Every December he would describe the annual mysterious package of food that anonymously arrived on his doorstep right around Christmas. He became a visual artist in his more recent years – a good one too – and even did some modelling in Italy.
Ah, it was such a great, heart-warming evening. But not so great as the man who had brought us all together; not so heart-warming as Kurt Walther. He was a hub of people, a hub of musicians…a hub of humanity. Kurt had a theoretical mind the size of the Superdome and enough empathy to lift an elephant.
Kurt was a heck of a guy all right. I, along with a sizeable pocket of Ottawa and environs, will miss him.
Smegma**.
*Rounded off, the three notes in a C chord – C E and G – vibrate at the frequencies 261 hertz, 330 hertz, and 392 hertz respectively while the vibrations for a G chord – G B and D – would be 392 hertz, 493 hertz, and hertz BPM respectively. Divide these numbers by ten, convert them from hertz to beats per minute and set your metronomes a-clicking to unearth the hitherto hidden rhythms of C and G major.
**This was one of Kurt’s many endearingly adolescent swears.
Todd Man Out 