Band enjoys when it gets back to its Roots

By DAN DELUCA

NEW YORK — It’s 10 minutes to show time backstage at “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon,” and Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson is wondering what the Roots have gotten themselves into.

“There are two sayings: ‘The grass is always greener on the other side’ and ‘Be careful what you wish for,’” says the drummer and bandleader of the Philadelphia hip-hop-plus ensemble. Since March 2, when Fallon replaced Conan O’Brien at 12:35 a.m. on NBC, the group has been aptly introduced to America as “The Legendary Roots Crew.”

The big man with the even bigger Afro, which is now being puffed out to maximum mushroom-cloud size in a makeup room at 30 Rockefeller Center, pauses. And laughs.

“I cannot wait till we’re off and can play a week on the road,” he says, smiling. “Those shows will now seem like vacation time. This is way more work than imaginable.”

Not that ?uestlove is complaining. In earning an unquestioned reputation as the greatest live band in hip-hop, the Roots — formed in the late ’80s by Thompson and rapper Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter when they were at the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts — kept a globe-spanning, 200-show-a-year, 2 1‚Ñ2-hour-a-night pace for more than 15 years.

“You know that secret room in [the video game] ‘Mario Brothers,’ where there’s a whole bunch of gold coins to collect? Like 200 gold coins?” he asks. “As far as getting gigs, that’s pretty much been our life, from ’93 until now.”

After a month of shows, the Roots is finding its rhythm as a television house band. And Fallon, the absurdist boy-next-door “Saturday Night Live” alum, clearly can’t believe his good fortune in snagging the group that he accurately calls — sorry, Max Weinberg 7 and Paul Shaffer’s CBS Orchestra — “the best band in late night.”

That rhythm starts with a daily two-hour Philadelphia-to-Manhattan bus trip to a Midtown recording studio. There, the group writes original music for what the members call between-segment “sandwiches,” and they work up witty snippets to play as guests are introduced. Serena Williams got E.U.’s “Da Butt,” Glenn Close heard the Carpenters’ “Close to You,” and Anna Kournikova was met by Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot.”

The regimen has forced on the band an old-fashioned way to make music that is new to them: a bunch of guys sitting around the studio together bouncing song ideas off one another. Those results can be heard onscreen as well as on “How I Got Over,” the Roots album due out in July.

“The synergy of a bunch of world-class musicians in a room together, there’s definitely something to be said for that,” says James Poyser. Clad in a T-shirt with Barack Obama’s head attached to Afropop pioneer Fela Kuti’s body, the keyboardist-songwriter-producer and sometime Root — “I’ve called myself ‘a stem’ for years” — has joined full time for the show.

The broadcast platform is giving the group “a new life, so to speak,” Trotter, his Yankees cap cocked to the side, says at the Midtown studio. In addition to him, Thompson and Poyser, the lineup includes guitarist “Captain” Kirk Douglas, percussionist Frank Knuckles, bassist Owen Biddle, sousaphonist Damon “Tuba Gooding Jr.” Bryson and keyboard player Kamal Gray.

“It’s exposing the Roots to a late-night-TV demographic who aren’t necessarily familiar with what we do. It’s shameless self-promotion, every day,” says Trotter, who’s also an actor featured in the indie flick “Explicit Ills” and has other films in the works.

The Roots, it seems, has been playing live every day since Thompson and Trotter and original bassist Christian McBride used to busk for tips two decades ago on Saturday afternoons.