For funk-jazz keyboardist Robert Walter, the San Diego native who now calls New Orleans home, music becoming a career was the result of two competing trends in his life as a young professional.

"When the Greyboy Allstars started, there became a point that it was a combination that we were traveling so much it was difficult to hold down a job and I was making enough money I could afford to quit my day job," he said by phone earlier this week from the road, on his way home from a gig in Nevada.

And while he laughingly shared a joke about a friend asking him about his "jazz millions," he also pointed out that his music has generated enough of an income to keep a roof over his head and food on the table, with no day job since he quit that last one while with the Greyboy Allstars in the early 1990s.

Still, he also admitted that finances aren't his strong suit.

"It's still not a priority," he said of making money off his music. "You gotta get by, but I still think first about whether I want to do the gig or not.

"I couldn't stand to play the same set, to 'play the record' every night -- it has to be exciting to me."

Interestingly, while Walter is known as a mainstay of the funk-jazz style he helped popularize, he said he doesn't consider himself a real jazz musician.

"I'm not a jazz musician," he said.

When asked if he's able to improvise a solo on the fly, one of the hallmarks that defines jazz, he said, "Yeah, but not in a real traditional sense. I've figured out my own way to do it. I've worked with a fair amount of what you might call real jazz musicians, and they seem to like what I'm doing, but I couldn't go to New York and play bebop."

Still, he seems to have made his peace with the fact that he's a former punk-rocker moving in jazz circles.

"What I've realized is, everyone's got their own niche where they're comfortable."

His interest in funk-jazz grew out of his and his friends' desire to find their own niche, and their devotion to finding the most obscure recordings possible.

"I got into it because my stepdad had some records; he had some Meters, some James Brown, and Herbie Hancock's 'Thrust.' Some Rufus and Chaka Khan. All that kind of stuff, I dug. As I grew older, I started investigating that stuff myself."

Walter said he and his friends began haunting used record stores, and trying to one-up each other in finding old, out-of-print albums.

"We wanted to feel we were the only people discovering this music. Obviously, we weren't the only ones, but it was our token."

While San Diego had already been a hotbed of fusing R&B with jazz, via Fattburger and its predecessor, the Bruce Cameron-Hollis Gentry Jazz Ensemble, Walter said the Greyboy Allstars consciously avoided that scene, wanting to find their own path.

"We resisted that in a lot of ways," he said of any influence from older local bands.

As for Saturday's concert at the Belly Up, opening up for former Greyboy Allstars bandmate Karl Denson and his Tiny Universe, Walter said his reunion show with his own 20th Congress is a move toward what he hopes is a 2009 rich in San Diego time.

"I want to do a 20th Congress record; we've been playing years and years, everybody's from San Diego. I've been doing the New Orleans thing for a couple years, and I want to get back home."

Karl Denson's Tiny Universe with Robert Walter's 20th Congress

When: 9 p.m. Dec. 27

Where: Belly Up Tavern, 143 S. Cedros Ave., Solana Beach

Admission: $20-$22

Info: (858)481-8140 or bellyup.com

Web: karldenson.com or robertwalter.com