“You can leave the lights off,” Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson says. It’s 9:45 a.m. in New York, and the seemingly tireless musical polymath — and cofounder, with Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter, of hip-hop collective The Roots — is in desperate need of a power nap. A whirlwind summer has finally drained his battery.
This summer alone, The Roots hosted the 16th edition of their blockbuster Roots Picnic headlined by Erykah Badu and Jay-Z — in his first major solo performance in seven years, and his only one this year outside of his Yankee Stadium shows; Thompson premiered his critically acclaimed Earth, Wind & Fire documentary; the group returned to the Montreux Jazz Festival more than three decades after its debut there and performed for the opening of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago — all on top of its 17-years-running gig as Jimmy Fallon’s late-night house band. “I’ll probably look at 2026 as our best bucket-list summer we’ve ever had,” says Thompson, 55.
For more than three decades, Thompson and his longtime creative partner Trotter have inspired each other to keep the same childlike sense of discovery that took root when they first met as big-dreaming teenagers at the Philadelphia High School for the Creative and Performing Arts. Starting with their 1999 breakthrough, Things Fall Apart, The Roots have released a string of acclaimed albums and picked up three Grammy Awards — and while the group’s lineup has changed over the years, Thompson and Trotter have remained the constants that both anchor it and continually expand its reach.
