Questlove

At 53 years old, Questlove has this physical status:

Ahmir Khalib Thompson (born January 20, 1971) also known as Questlove (stylized as?uestlove) is an American musician and music journalist.

He is the drummer and joint frontman for the Grammy Award-winning band The Roots (with Black Thought).

Since February 17, 2014, the Roots have been in-house band for Jimmy Fallon of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

Questlove is also one of the Broadway musical Hamilton's producers.

He is co-founder of Okayplayer and OkayAfrica.

In addition, Questlove is an adjunct instructor at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music in New York University, including Elvis Costello, Common, D'Angelo, Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, Bilal, Nikka Costa, and John Legend.

He is a member of the Soulquarians, The Soultronics, The Beat Biters, The Grand Negaz, and The Grand Wizzards, and The Soulquarians, A.K.A.

Early life

On January 20, 1971, Ahmir Khalib Thompson was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, into a musical family. Arthur Lee Andrews Thompson, of Goldsboro, North Carolina, was his father. Lee Andrews, a singer who was born Lee Andrews, was leader of Lee Andrews & the Hearts, a 1950s doo-wop group. Beachy Thompson, Ahmir's grandfather, performed with the Dixie Hummingbirds, a member of the Dixie Hummingbirds. Jacquelin Thompson, Ahmir's mother, and his father were both members of the Philadelphia-based soul group Congress Alley. While on tour, his parents did not want to leave him with babysitters so they took him with them. He appeared on backstages of doo-wop shows. Thompson began playing on stage at shows as a child, and by 13, he had become a musical director.

Questlove's parents enrolled him at the Philadelphia High School for the Performing Arts. By the time he graduated, he had formed the Square Roots (later dropping the word "square") with his friend Tariq Trotter (Black Thought). Boyz II Men, jazz bassist Christian McBride, jazz guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, jazz organist Joey DeFrancesco, and singer Amel Larrieux were among Questlove's classmates at the Philadelphia High School for the Performing Arts. He appeared at Larrieux's senior prom. He took jazz and composition classes at the Settlement Music School after graduating from high school.

Thompson began performing on South Street in Philadelphia, using drums, while Tariq rhymed over his beats and rhythms. Thompson and Jay Lonick, a childhood friend, were known for improvisational "call and response" percussion battles with plastic buckets, crates, and shopping carts. Thompson's basic drumset arrangement was transposed into Thompson's regular drumset set arrangement, with the majority of drums and cymbals positioned at waist level, mimicing his original street setups.

Questlove's DNA was tested on his laptop and on television at OkayAfrica TV in 2011, and genealogists looked into his family roots in 2011. Both of Questlove's genetic parents' DNA revealed that he is of West African descent, specifically the Mende people (found mainly in Sierra Leone, as well as Guinea and Liberia).

Questlove learned in December 2017 that he descends in part from Charles and Maggie Lewis, his three times great-grandparents who were captured in combat and sold as slaves in the port of Ouidah, Dahomey (now Benin), to American ship captain William Foster, according to PBS television series Finding Your Roots, hosted by Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. They were smuggled illegally to Mobile, Alabama, in July 1860, on the Clotilda. It was the first known slave ship to carry slaves to the United States. Questlove is the only visitor to Gates' programme to descend from slaves identified by name, ship, and where they came from in Africa.

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Career

Questlove on drums and percussion, Tariq Trotter and Malik B on vocals, Josh Abrams (Rubber Band) on bass (who was replaced by Leonard Hubbard in 1994), and Scott Storch on keyboards were among the Roots' lineups, with Questlove on drums and percussion, Tariq Trotter and Malik B on vocals, Josh Abrams (Rubber Band) on bass (who was percussion, Organix, the group's debuting of a show in Germany, was released by Relativity Records in 1993.

The band kept on recording, releasing two critically acclaimed albums in 1995 and 1996. Does Your Love More???? According to the Illadelph Halflife and the Illadelph Halflife, respectively.

The Roots had mainstream success in 1999 with "You Got Me" (featuring Erykah Badu); the album received the Grammy Award for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group for 2000. The songs contributed to the success of their Things Fall Apart album, which has since been lauded as a masterpiece and is now available in platinum.

Questlove, D'Angelo's 2000 album Voodoo, Slum Village's album Fantastic, Vol. 2, was produced by Questlove. Water for Chocolate and Electric Circus are two of Common's albums. Besides the above mentioned albums, he has worked as a drummer or producer to Erykah Badu's Baduizm and Mama's Gun, Dilated People's Expansion Team, Bilal's 1st Born Second, Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine, and Zack De La Rocha's recently unveiled solo work.

In 2001, he performed as the drummer for The Philadelphia Experiment, a collaborative instrumental jazz album starring Christian McBride and Uri Caine, as well as the DJ of the compilation Questlove Presents: Babies Making Babies, which was released on Urban Theory Records. For Christina Aguilera's song "Life Me 4 Me" on her 2002 album Stripped, he played drums. Phrenology, which went gold, was released by he and the Roots in 2002.

He played drums on John Mayer's "Clarity" from his second album Heavier Things in 2003. "Fell in Love with a Girl" by Joss Stone was also arranged and drummed on the White Stripes' "Fell in Love with a Girl."

The Roots released The Tipping Point, a more popular sound, in 2004, despite Interscope Records' requests. The album has been out of print for 400,000 copies. Questlove appeared in Jay-Z's Fade to Black in 2004. Questlove, who appeared in the documentary version of the film, was the drummer/musical director for all of the show with a live band. In a television commercial for the Motorola ROKR phone in 2005, Questlove appeared alongside musicians including Madonna, Iggy Pop, Bootsy Collins, and Little Richard. In the 2005 film The Longest Yard, Questlove appears in a short clip.

Questlove appeared in Dave Chappelle's Block Party, as well as a few skits on Chappelle's Show in 2006. These included the Tupac "The Lost Episodes" skit and one featuring John Mayer, where Questlove performs in a barber store, causing the occupants to dance and rap. Questlove performed as the drummer at the 2004 Brooklyn street festival and was the musical director for the entire performance, with the exception of the Fugees and Jill Scott. In the June issue of Esquire magazine's 2006 Best Scribe, Questlove was awarded an Esky for Best Scribe. Questlove was one of a select few musicians hand-picked by Steve Van Zandt in 2006 for the season premiere (and official ESPN debut) of Monday Night Football. Questlove's bandmates, Rick Nielsen (Cheap Trick), Joe Perry (Aerosmith), Charlie Daniels, and Bernie Worrell appeared alongside his Motorola ROKR commercial co-stars, Bootsy Collins and Little Richard. He appeared in the Italian singer Zucchiari's Studio album Fly in the same year.

Questlove co-produced with VH1's The Score winner Antonio "DJ Satisfaction" Gonzalez, the Maniac Agenda's 2007 Hip Hop Honors, 2007, the theme was "DJ Satisfaction" Gonzalez, the VH1's "DJ Satisfaction" Gonzalez. Questlove competed against Ben Harper and John Paul Jones in the Bonnaroo SuperJam on June 16, 2007, making it a 97-minute set.

Questlove and the Roots formed as a house band for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon on March 2, 2009. Jimmy Fallon, a member of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, is still playing with the Roots, and he's also doing television from Jimmy Fallon's appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. He performed solos titled,'remixing the clips,' where he relied on his DJ skills to create dub video clips, cue audio samples in time, and play drum breaks simultaneously.

Questlove recruited Jay-Z to join as a producer in late 2009, while being an associate producer of the hit Broadway play Fela! Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith had also signed on as producers, according to the story.

He was composing content for her second album in January 2010. In a commercial for Microsoft's brief-lived smartphone, the Kin, he has been seen in a commercial. He appeared in Duck Sauce's "Barbra Stassian" music video in 2010, and he and the Roots released the album Dilla Joints with a remix of producer J Dilla's music. He was on the drums on "You Got a Lot to Learn," Evanescence's self-titled third studio album, but did not appear on the final release.

Before her death in July 2011, Questlove was planning to collaborate with Amy Winehouse. "We're Skype friends," he said, and she and Mos want to do a project together. That's gonna happen as soon as she gets her visa papers together. Questlove is the second most popular tweeters in Music, according to Rolling Stone. Questlove performed drums with Roots bassist Owen Biddle in June 2011's adaptation of Nicki Minaj's "Super Bass." Questlove ranked eighth in the Rolling Stone Readers' Top Drummers of all Time.

Questlove Supreme, Questlove Supreme, launched a weekly radio show on Pandora, which was launched in September 2016. Solange, Chris Rock, Maya Rudolph, and Pete Rock were among the notable guests.

Alec Baldwin spoke with Questlove on the WNYC podcast Here's the Thing, where he joked about being "obsessed" with his Wikipedia page. During the interview, he also discussed his musical and cultural interests, how the Roots started a "movement," and the consequences of the departure of musical icons in 2016.

In addition to being the show's in-house DJ, he performed as the musical director of both the 2020 and 2021 Academy Awards ceremony. The performance at the 2020 awards was largely rewritten from compositions by his band The Roots, although there was no in-house orchestra present.

Questlove made his directorial debut with Summer of Soul (or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), a film about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival that featured performances by Stevie Wonder, Sly and The Family Stone, Nina Simone, Mahalia Jackson, Mavis Staples, B.B. King, and several other top Soul, Jazz, Gospel, and Latin artists of the period. At the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, Summer of Souls received both the US Grand Jury Award and the Audience Award for documentary. Searchlight Pictures, a Disney-owned company, acquired the film for distribution, bringing a new Sundance Film Festival record for documentary film acquisition price.

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