The multi-talented Ahmir (Questlove) Thompson is the drummer, primary spokesperson and driving force behind revolutionary Hip-hop artists The Roots.
Committed to using only real instruments in their music and to combining jazz with experimental and other contemporary grooves, Questlove and his band have been changing the face of modern Hip-hop since 1991. Armed with the most minimal of kits and the fiercest groove you've heard in awhile, Quest is really doing something fresh and different. "With each album, the challenge is to make live instruments sound like real (sampled) Hip-hop, through the recording process. That's the joy in recording," he says. Their groundbreaking album "Do you want more?!!!??!" was a startling tutorial in how to strip a groove down to its most vital and core elements.
The album "Things Fall Apart" proved to be the bands most successful album at the time, featuring the Grammy winning single "You Got Me." Since then Quest and The Roots have released 2 more groundbreaking albums as well as performing with Jay-Z on his MTV Unplugged Album. An equally accomplished writer Quest has produced and played on albums from D'Angelo, Jaguar Wright, Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, Macy Gray and Joss Stone among many others.
"Hip-hop is based in rhythm, repetition, and perfect time," says Thompson. "With Roots stuff, I go for a more perfect, quantized-type sound than I would with, say, Erykah or D'Angelo. For D'Angelo's Voodoo, we wanted to play as perfectly as we could, but then deliberately insert the little glitch that makes it sound messed up. The idea was to sound disciplined, but with a total human feel." For Thompson, "human feel" is bred in the bone. His father was the leader of the '50s doo-wop group Lee Andrews and the Hearts, and Ahmir literally grew up onstage. "My whole family was involved playing the oldies circuit with groups like the Coasters, the Drifters, the Chiffons," he says. "I was playing percussion at gigs from the age of seven because my parents didn't believe in babysitters. By 13, I was the musical director, and I stayed in that world until I got a record deal with the Roots at age 22."
But Thompson is quick to point out that he is no real-time purist: "In actuality, one of the biggest influences on my drumming is a producer and drum programmer named Jaydee, from the group Slum Village. He makes programmed stuff so real, you really can't tell it's programmed. He might program 128 bars, with absolutely no looping or quantizing. When Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest first played me some of his stuff, I said, 'The drums are messed up! The time is wrong!' And when we did a song for D'Angelo's record that Lenny Kravitz was supposed to play on, Lenny said, 'I can't play with this' there's a discrepancy in the drum pattern.' And we're like, 'It's supposed to be this way!'"
Questlove's tireless studio experimentation is as crucial to his drum sounds as the instruments themselves. "I like to mold sounds like clay," he says. "Sometimes I put drums through a guitar amp. Or we might put mikes everywhere in the room, down the hall, anyplace you might hear the drums. Sometimes we use just the farthest mikes, EQ them until they sound dirty enough, mix it all to one track, really compress it, and then bounce it to another track. We'd go around that cycle a few times ”six generations, maybe."
Questlove is without question one of the most important new voices in modern drumset playing.