Joseph "Amp" Fiddler an accomplished keyboard player who has shared stages and studios with everyone from Prince and George Clinton to Primal Scream and underground Detroit producer Moodyman, Fiddler played a pivotal role in bringing Slum Village to global attention, and was a friend and collaborator with their producer, the late James "J Dilla/Jay Dee" Yancey. His warm, expansive, mellifluous music takes stylistic cues from all these encounters, but emerges as earthy, supremely relaxed, and rooted in the funk and soul that Amp feels most connected to. And, as he suggests, it is music for the head as much as food for the heart and soul.

Afro Strut, Amp's second solo album, finds him stepping onwards and upwards as he continues to define his own, very singular style. It's also a record made with reference to a wider world--a world that has warmly embraced Amp and his music. The title track, which features the veteran Afro-funk pioneer Tony Allen (who recorded his parts in Paris), appears as a series of linking fragments, giving the record a strong foundation in the motherland.

Amp weaves songs that speak of the personal and political, the sacred and profane. It is almost as if, while his music has grown and headed out across geographical and emotional boundaries, his songs have homed in on those things he knows best, those feelings he can most clearly express. Amp never cut the stereotypical figure of the sideman with frustrated solo ambitions: instead, he bided his time, and his solo debut, the critically acclaimed Waltz Of A Ghetto Fly, reaped the rewards.

After learning piano as a child, Fiddler studied music at Oakland and Wayne State Universities in Detroit, Michigan, and with the jazz great Harold McKinney. He joined a do-wop outfit, The Enchantments, as a teen, then in 1983 received his big break when a friend passed a tape of his playing to George Clinton. Bernie Worrell, the Parliament-Funkadelic keyboardist, was leaving the mothership, and Amp ended up replacing him, touring with Clinton and the P-Funk Mob for more than a decade.

courtesy of Amp Fidder
Myspace.com/ampfiddler