Bob Power, the musician, producer, and engineer who sat behind the boards on classics by A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Erykah Badu, The Roots, and D’Angelo, has died. He was 73.
Power’s death was confirmed by NYU’s Clive Davis Institute, where he worked as a professor. A funeral listing stated that Power died on Sunday, March 1, but no cause of death was given.
Power helped shape the sound of hip-hop and R&B in the early Nineties, especially when it came to plumbing deeper drum and bass grooves. He engineered the album that arguably defined this aesthetic, A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory, while his credits also included Badu’s Baduizm, D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar, De La Soul’s De La Soul Is Dead, and several Roots albums, including Do You Want More?!!!??! and Things Fall Apart.
Paying tribute on Instagram, Questlove wrote of Power, “You could NOT encounter a more engaging, enthusiastic, laser focused craftsman of sound and sonics. I mean he’d let me bug him ad nausea about ‘what does this button do? That button?’ Bob was our training wheels for how to present music. I’m so devastated by his passing. Thank you for changing all of our lives Bob.”
DJ Premier called Power “one of the iLLest Engineers of all time,” while Badu wrote on Instagram, “What a great loss for the music community today. The great engineer, producer, mentor and friend @bobpower has travled on. I / we appreciate you. You taught me soo much… Love and easy breaths to your loved ones ! Our community will forever Say your name.”
Power was born in Chicago in 1952, raised outside of New York City, and started playing guitar as a kid. He went on to study classical theory and composition at Webster University in St. Louis, while at the same time joined his first rock & roll band, the New Direction. After graduating, he ventured to San Francisco, where he enrolled in a masters program, studied jazz, gigged constantly, and also started composing music for television.
Over the course of the late Seventies and early Eighties, Power was the epitome of a working musician. After moving to New York City in 1982, a timeline on Power’s website half-joked that his career involved: “Playing every gig imaginable, bad dance records, mafia weddings in Bensonhurst for $75, psychiatric hospitals (yes, really).” He also found work producing and scoring music for commercials and corporate clients.
What would turn out to be Power’s break came in 1984 when the owner of Calliope Studios asked Power to fill in as an engineer while someone was on vacation. He wound up in a session with the hip-hop band Stetsasonic, who were so impressed with Power’s work they asked him to stay on as they crafted the rest of their debut album, On Fire.
Through Calliope, Power soon met, and started working with, the likes of A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and Jungle Brothers. Though both hip-hop and professional engineering were relatively new to him, he embraced the possibilities this opened up.
As he recalled in a 2014 Red Bull Music Academy interview: “I was learning so much at the same time that when people said, ‘Well, we want to do this.’ I’d say, ‘How do you want to do it?’ They’d say, ‘What do you mean? We just want to do it.’ It was creative problem solving for me, and it coincided with a great time of growth in understanding and learning about engineering. I started to think of as engineering as creative problem-solving rather than something that was supposed to be in a particular way because of a canon that had been established by somebody else.”
Power molded a sound that emphasized and expertly blended loud drums, “excessive bass” (as the timeline on his website put it), and increasingly elaborate and intricate samples. On Tribe’s The Low End Theory, Power showed a particular knack for meticulously cleaning up, isolating, and then blending together the exact sounds members Q-Tip and Ali Shaheed Muhammad wanted to sample.
As Questlove pointed out in his tribute, he was also able to make the drums “Crispy & Loud” and the bass “full.” He continued: “Before him? Hip Hop was chaotic & muddy (in the most beautiful way ever)… I love dirty ish…. But man — when Bob entered our sonic sphere? Jesus.”
Power continued to work with A Tribe Called Quest, while also linking up with the Roots, D’Angelo, and Badu. The latter’s classic “On & On” helped give Power his first Number One R&B single, while his work on Me’shell Ndegeocello’s 1996 LP Place Beyond Passion earned Power a Grammy nomination for Best Engineered Album – Non-Classical. He earned another Grammy nomination, this one for Album of the Year, for his work on India Arie’s 2001 album, Acoustic Soul.
“Beyond being a musical legend who influenced the sound and feel of an important era in our cultural history, he was one of the most generous and caring people I had the great honor of calling a friend, a brother, and a teacher,” Clive Davis Institute Chair Nick Sansano said in an email to staff. “It was very telling [in tributes] that no one focused on his amazing professional success and stature, his wealth, or his awards and possessions. The light shone – and will continue to shine – on Bob Power, the man.”
Power remained busy and in-demand into the new millennium, collaborating with many of the same artists, as well as acts like Common, Talib Kweli, and J Dilla. His services were also sought out by David Byrne, Scritti Politti, and Brockhampton. In 2022, he contributed to the posthumous Phife Dawg album, Forever, while his last two album credits were Ndegeocello’s 2023 LP The Omnichord Real Book and China Moses’ It’s Complicated…, released last year.
“The fact that I’ve been able to participate in a lot of seminal recordings is just another wonderful thing that has come my way in my life,” Power said in that Red Bull Music Academy interview. “I live in New York. I have a home that’s really nice. I get to the country. I have a dog I love. I have people around me that I love. I get to do things that I’m passionate about. I have almost every piece of gear I ever wanted. I consider my path in the art of making records as having actually worked out much better than my wildest dreams.”
