The Chronicle

Issue date: 2/21/08 Section: Recess
Last update: 2/21/08 at 7:02 AM EST

In addition to cofounding the Roots, Ahmir Thompson (aka ?uestlove) has played alongside a list of legends that includes just about everyone imaginable. And John Mayer. recess's Bryan Sayler recently spoke with the iconic drummer about the Roots' upcoming album (Rising Down), ringtones and growing up under the tutelage of his father, doo-wop frontman Lee Andrews.

You grew up surrounded by the soul and doo-wop movements. How has that impacted you as a musician?

I spent a lot of time backstage watching groups get their harmonies together, in terms of... there's a certain incorrect way. I mean, no chord structure is correct or incorrect, but the be-all, end-all law of harmonics is this European mode of doing chords. And, of course, once jazz comes into play, then there's different ways to look at a chord. But doo-wop is sort of the stepchild of jazz in that a lot of times the incorrect chord is used to do harmonies. But it's sort of an art form to me.

So, if anything, that's what I learned from watching that era, a third way to use chord structure-the same way that, once Coltrane got hip to Indian culture, African and Egyptian culture, he learned a whole new scale, scales that they weren't using in America.

As far as the shows were concerned, I learned how to pace the show. I learned the high points and the low points of a show and how it should be paced. My father used to always say, "The two most important parts of a show are the first 15 minutes and the last 15 minutes. No one ever remembers the middle."

What do you think hip-hop as a whole owes to those movements?

It's a continual domino theory. Hip-hop-and I hate to be that guy that does the whole apartheid separation thing-really there are two definitions of it. I'm coming from the purist standpoint of what hip-hop is, not the "let's grab the remote control and see what's on TV-oh that's hip hop" definition. Hip-hop is the combination of all those cultures rolled into one, like a bowl of stew. If anything, from a record standpoint, the fact that they're taking bits and pieces of every culture and turning it into their own, I think that hip-hop owes a lot to doo-wop, especially my brand of hip -hop, which I jokingly say is the new doo-wop, i.e. the beautiful culture that no one cares about anymore (laughing)-except for the chosen few. But it's also its own world. Hip-hop owes as much to doo-wop as it does to jazz as it owes to any type of music, because that's where it comes from-other types of music.

Continued...

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