QUESTLOVE IS A MANY SPLENDORED THING

There are music lovers, and there are music lifers.

The folks who love music with a passion are legion. But then there are the people like polymath Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson for whom even the most avid enjoyment of music still falls woefully short.

Music lifers embark on a lifelong obsessive compulsion not just with music itself; they spend their waking hours collecting obscure records in a panoply of genres. If they are blessed with musical skills, they will pursue the musician’s life with a single-minded focus typically reserved for elite athletes, actors or politicians.

And if, like Questlove, they are able to achieve worldwide acclaim―he’s the recipient of six Grammys―and Top 40 commercial success, they may just get tapped by a certain late-night TV host to use their ensemble as the house band for his wildly popular program (see Fallon, Jimmy).

They might use their elevated status to engage in creative pursuits like writing books and producing music documentaries―Questlove’s ardor for classic soul, funk, jazz and R&B from the late ’60s and early ’70s led to his participation in the Oscar-winning Summer of Soul, the widely hailed unearthing of footage from the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival known as “The Black Woodstock.”

And if all that weren’t enough, they might even serve as a producer of a little Broadway show called Hamilton.

But we’re not here to merely praise Ahmir Thompson or recount his seemingly endless accomplishments. The question at hand is: How did Questlove emerge? What are the story beats that turned him into a music lifer?

Born in Philadelphia on Jan. 20, 1971, young Ahmir was immersed in the heady world of music virtually from birth. In 2013’s Mo’ Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove, he describes the indelible effect heavily rhythmic―Black―music had not just on him but on anyone of African descent: “[African music] was… the world of proto-breaks, an intimate connection between rhythm and movement, between time and life… The slave owners were afraid that the drum was some kind of magic signal system, a primal, coded language, which it was. And is.”

Speaking to the centrality of song in African American life, he asserts: “There was humanity in the songs, and multivocal humanity, a call and then a response, a way for the speaker to know that his speech was being heard, that he wasn’t alone in the world, not in his love or his pain or his humanity.”

Questlove’s father was Lee Andrews, who, as leader of the R&B vocal group Lee Andrews & the Hearts, scored a hit with the doo-wop classic “Teardrops” in 1958. His mother, Jacquelin Thompson, was also a professional singer, and one who refused to hire babysitters, so Ahmir literally grew up in the nightclubs and other venues where his parents performed.

In addition to being musicians, his folks were enthusiastic collectors of records and musical instruments. Ahmir was given an array of toy instruments for Christmas as a two-year-old in 1973. He gravitated toward the drums. “That was the epiphany,” he would later write, “the mountain coming to Mohammed… Drums and I found each other just like that—BOOM!—it was like I’d been struck by lightning.” By the time he was 13, he’d become not only a drummer but a bandleader in his own right.

His parents’ 5,000-strong vinyl record collection likewise had a transformative impact: “My father took everything that interested him, from rock to soul to folk to country. If he liked it, he liked it… Then there was my mom. If anyone in my family is what you’d think of as a crate-digger, it would be her… If the package looked cool, that was enough for her. As it turns out, many of these records would be used as breakbeats in the future, so in a way it was an early education for my career in hip-hop.”

It was clear to both Ahmir and his family that although he was more than musically adept, he was socially awkward, which made him uncomfortable at school. “The only people I had interacted with at that point were my parents, my sister and my father’s band,” he remembers. “To go from that world, the only world I knew, into this [elementary school environment] was like entering some kind of house of horrors.” Music provided a welcome respite from those anxieties and an opportunity to immerse himself in the nascent world of hip-hop.

Too young to have personally experienced the Big Bang of rap—August 1973, the annus mirabilis when Kool Herc legendarily played records with extended breaks on twin turntables, unwittingly giving birth to hip-hop—Ahmir was nonetheless the perfect age in 1979 to seize on The Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight,” which he first heard on Philadelphia radio station WDA 105.3 when he was eight years old.

Much as The Beatles’ appearance on Ed Sullivan in February of 1964 inspired countless young people to start their own bands, “Rapper’s Delight” had an incalculable, enduring impact on youngsters like Ahmir Thompson: “All the black kids in Philadelphia who were listening to the radio that day have the same story. It stopped us in our tracks. I was paralyzed… Within a week everyone had heard ‘Rapper’s Delight,’ and the world was different forever.”

Indeed, Ahmir fell hard for this new music, recounting in his memoir, “Every Monday there was a new rap single, so my goal was to find 32 dimes within a seven-day period so I could buy the next 12-inch. If my mother asked me if I had put the dimes in the collection plate at church, I said, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ but they were in fact going to another higher power: a fund to help me buy records. And just like that, my record-buying obsession began.”

As a teenager, he was enrolled in the Philadelphia High School for the Creative and Performing Arts, where he formed The Square Roots, later shortened to The Roots, with his creative foil, MC Tariq Trotter (aka Black Thought). Among Ahmir’s other classmates were Christian McBride, the members of Boyz II Men, the late jazz organist Joey DeFrancesco and guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel (renowned in hip-hop circles for his work with Q-Tip). Thanks to the school’s richly creative environment, Ahmir’s head spun with not just hip-hop but jazz, R&B and rock. He naturally brought his eclectic musical tastes to The Roots.

Having fallen sway to the Native Tongues (creative home to such innovative ensembles as De La Soul, The Jungle Brothers and A Tribe Called Quest), Ahmir adopted the stage name “Questlove,” which served as both a tribute to Tribe and confirmation of his intellectual curiosity. The rest, as they say is history: success with The Roots, fruitful collaborations as a producer, music direction of no less than the storied Tonight Show and… the list goes on.

All of it is, of course, the product of Questlove’s endless devotion to, and continuing obsession with, the magic of music―his life, past, present and future.

Top photo in green: Daniel Dorsa