David Risqué

David “Risqué” Walker, aka The Global Groove Guru, may be best known as the dancing Indian at The Chosen Few Old School Reunion Picnic, but his house music bona fides run deep, all the way back to 1979 when Wayne Williams and The Chosen Few Disco Corp. began promoting parties at The Loft on 14th and Michigan. Born in Englewood, but raised all over the South Side, including in South Shore and West Pullman neighborhoods, David Walker came up on the danceable funk and soul of Chicago’s version of Soul Train. He remembers going to dance at Mendel before he got a taste of The Loft, but once he found the underground, he never looked back. In 1979 Walker had started his freshman year at Western Illinois University in Macoma, where he and his friend Michael Benson helped promote a Dukes and Duchess chapter for Black students as an alternative to the Greek system. The project turned into a promotional entity, Gentleman’s Unification of Conceptional Individuals, or Gucci, which Walker brought back with him when he returned to Chicago. He also created a party-promoting entity called Rare Sounds and Space with Roy McAlister and the late Howard Williams. At eighteen years old, Walker/Gucci began promoting parties at Sauer’s, a German restaurant in the South Loop with DJs Andre Hatchett and Celeste Alexander. He made history when he brought a young musician-cum-DJ with conservative parents named Steve Hurley to perform there for a DJ battle. Walker’s brief and illustrious career as a risk-taking dance party promoter was cut short when he left Chicago to join the US Marine Corp. in 1982. He spent the next couple years traveling the world before returning to the city in the early 1990s following a stint working as an actor and model in New York, where he also moonlighted as a security guard who produced events at legendary clubs like The Choice, Better Days, and The Tunnel. He would go on to work from 1992 to 1998 at Red Dog, produce parties in The Cabaret Room at KA-BOOM!, and perform with Vic Lavender and Jere McAllister in the group Mr. ALI.