Bob Power, the producer, mixer, and engineer who manned the console on hip-hop and R&B classics by A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Erykah Badu, and many more, has died. He was 73.
New York University’s Clive Davis Institute, where Power was a professor, confirmed his death after fellow hip-hop legend DJ Premier shared the news on X/Twitter. “R.I.P. to one of the iLLest Engineers of all time,” he wrote. “Thank you for various pointers in recording from D’Angelo to ATCQ’s Low End Theory, Erykah Badu’s Baduizm and so on!”
Born on April 9th, 1952, in Chicago, Power was raised in the New York City metro area before moving to St. Louis to study music theory at Webster College. After earning his master’s degree in jazz from San Francisco’s Lone Mountain College, Power remained in California and scored for TV and advertising campaigns throughout the mid-1970s and early ’80s
Power returned to New York in 1982, landing his big break after impressing Brooklyn hip-hop group Stetasonic, who recruited him to engineer their 1986 debut, On Fire. In the early ’90s, Power linked up with pioneering New York hip-hop collective The Native Tongues, serving as the recording engineer on A Tribe Called Quest’s seminal The Low End Theory. During that same era, he sat behind the boards on De La Soul’s De La Soul Is Dead.
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While Power continued working with A Tribe Called Quest, he also ingratiated himself with another foundational crew, The Soulquarians. During the mid-90s to early 2000s, he either mixed or engineered on genre-defining albums including D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar, Erykah Badu’s Baduizm, Common’s Like Water for Chocolate, and The Roots’ Things Fall Apart.
Badu’s “On & On” landed Power his first No. 1 R&B single, and he also received a Grammy nomination for Best Engineered Album for Me’Shell N’degéocello’s Peace Beyond Passion.
“Bob was the KING of the Low End,” The Roots’ Questlove wrote on Instagram, explaining Power’s influence. “Drums Crispy & Loud (cue A Tribe Called Quest ‘Buggin Out’) but the BASS is FULL (peep ‘On & On’ from Erykah — he makes it sound and feel so easy) but before him? Hip Hop was chaotic & muddy (in the most beautiful way ever — peep Straight Out the Jungle for the OG Wu Tang dirty sound [a]esthetic).”
Questlove continued, “You could NOT encounter a more engaging, enthusiastic, laser focused craftsman of sound and Sonic’s (engineer/mixing/production) I mean he’d let me bug him ad nausea [sic] about ‘what does this button do? that button?’ Bob was our training wheels for how to present music.”
Badu expressed similar thoughts in her own Instagram post. “You taught me soo much,” she wrote. “Baduizm is thee most bass heavy singing album in history. You mixed like a TRIBE album!”
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated with Robert Power’s correct birthdate and age.
