Amp Fiddler

Not long after George Clinton hired him in 1984, Fiddler found himself in a Los Angeles hotel room when the boss's assistant asked if he wanted to ride along to see Sly Stone. He sat down next to him, played for a minute, then was told to leave — but a week later was back in the studio while Clinton worked with Stone. 'I already got a big influence from listening to his albums,' Fiddler told the outlet musicOMH in 2004, 'so meeting and hearing him was amazing.' The brush with his hero, layered onto years of studying the Family Stone's records, is the debt he still names.

listen: upstream & hereshare

1973

In TimeSly and the Family Stone

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2004

Waltz of a Ghetto FlyAmp Fiddler

listen forSteve Hands, reviewing Fiddler's debut for the outlet musicOMH, wrote that 'listening to Waltz of a Ghetto Fly recalls another great of funk — Sly Stone circa the Fresh album.' On 'In Time,' from Fresh (1973), the band sits deliberately behind the beat, the rhythm section clipped and unhurried instead of driving forward. The title track of Waltz of a Ghetto Fly works the same way — Fiddler's keys and drums settle into that same laid-back, almost stumbling pocket rather than chasing the tempo. It's a specific kind of restraint, absorbed from records he loved long before he ever sat beside the man who made them.

By the time Strut Records paired him with the Jamaican production duo Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare for a joint album, Fiddler had been listening to them for two decades. 'With me having been a fan of Sly & Robbie's for years — right back to their early-Eighties Compass Point Studios productions on Grace Jones — I was super-excited about it,' he told the magazine Blues & Soul. What he'd studied wasn't just the rhythm but the layering: 'they recorded that reggae-style island music and then had Wally Badarou overdub the freaky synthesizer stuff on top,' he said — a dub-bottom, synth-top formula he'd carry into his own record.

listen: upstream & hereshare

1986

Boops (Here to Go)Sly and Robbie

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2008

Crazy DayAmp Fiddler

listen forSly and Robbie's 1986 hit 'Boops (Here to Go)' is built the way Fiddler described admiring: a stripped-down, syncopated riddim under a synthesizer hook riding on top, shiny and cheap as a dime-store toy. 'Crazy Day,' the song the trio cut together for Inspiration Information twenty-two years later, keeps that same architecture — a lean, one-drop-adjacent groove with Fiddler's synth lines doing the talking above it — except now Fiddler himself is playing the part he used to just admire from records.

Before any band or studio credit, there was a sign. Tired of stealing guitar pedals with a neighborhood friend just to 'freak the guitar out and get some wild sounds,' a teenage Fiddler saw a sign for piano lessons — seven dollars a half hour — and signed up. 'I signed up for lessons with this old lady, Ms. Whitney. She was about 87,' he told Red Bull Music Academy Daily in 2017. 'I studied with her for a year and a half, and then I started going to college.' It was his only formal training on the instrument that would define his career.

listen: upstream & hereshare

1974

No known recordingMs. Whitney

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2004

You Play MeAmp Fiddler

listen forThere's no recording of Ms. Whitney's lessons — just scales and half-hour sessions, seven dollars at a time, for a year and a half. What she left behind is audible in the instrument itself: listen to 'You Play Me,' where Fiddler's own hands carry the song — spare, chord-voiced piano figures under his voice, played on the instrument he'd once refused to study as a boy before signing up with her. The bridge from a stolen-pedal garage band to a keyboardist's career runs through her front room.