Bob Power, a Grammy-nominated producer, mixer and recording engineer best known for his innovative and genre-bending collaborations with artists like D’Angelo, Erykah Badu and A Tribe Called Quest, died on Sunday. He was 73.
The death was confirmed by the Baltimore-area Sol Levinson funeral home, which did not cite a cause or say where he died.
While Mr. Power was not a household name, he shaped the sound of generations of artists, particularly in R&B and hip-hop. His influence was felt widely beginning in the 1980s, when he was an engineer at Calliope Studios in New York, which incubated some of the most influential rap artists of the 1990s, including De La Soul. Mr. Power earned a reputation for his willingness to experiment.
“Great music is made by people who either don’t care or don’t understand what is ‘normal’ so they do something extraordinary,” Mr. Power said in a 2022 interview with the podcast “The Third Story With Leo Sidran.”
Among his most notable collaborations was with A Tribe Called Quest on its second album “The Low End Theory” (1991). Mr. Power had worked on the group’s first album, “People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm,” which was released the previous year.
But the sophomore effort is a considered a seminal hip-hop album for its blend of jazz and rap, the creativity of the group members Q-Tip and Phife Dawg, as well as Mr. Power’s skillfully mixed samples, which he layered on top of the playing of the jazz bassist Ron Carter.
“Everything back then was a big struggle, technically,” Mr. Power told the trade publication AudioFanZine in 2018. “In the early days of MIDI, the interfaces were really dodgy. Samplers were extremely primitive; sequencers were extremely primitive. There were no in-the-box virtual instruments; everything was outboard.”
But Mr. Power helped create a sound that made it seem as if all the musicians were playing together, despite the sounds being assembled from disparate sources.
“Part of how I heard that record, which I believe is how it is, is there were elaborate reconstructions,” Mr. Power told OkayPlayer, a culture website co-founded by the drummer, D.J. and producer Questlove, in 2016. “Actual new music was coming out of combinations of samples in ways that people had never done before.”
In the 1990s, Mr. Power went on to work with a roster of artists that included Ms. Badu, De La Soul, Run-D.M.C., the Roots, D’Angelo and Fu-Schnickens. (Mr. Power also mixed several tracks on “Shaq Diesel,” the 1993 debut rap album by the N.B.A. star Shaquille O’Neal, which became an unexpected success.)
“I am a slave to the song,” Mr. Power said in a 2007 interview with TapeOp Magazine. “When artists ask, ‘What’s your approach?’ I say, ‘My approach is always whatever the song wants to be.’”
Mr. Power was nominated for two Grammy Awards. The first came in 1996 for Meshell Ndegeocello’s album “Peace Beyond Passion,” in the Best Engineered Album — Non-Classical category. Five years later, Mr. Power was nominated again for his work on the India Arie album “Acoustic Soul,” which was a contender for Album of the Year. Responding to an Instagram post about Mr. Power on Tuesday, Ms. Arie said, “I think about him periodically because he’s the first person who told me to always wash my hands before I pick up my guitar.”
Beginning in 2006, Mr. Power began teaching at New York University as an arts professor. He taught there for almost two decades, retiring last year. One of his students was the singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers, who said on Instagram that Mr. Power “was one of my all time favorite professors.”
Robert Power was born in Chicago on April 5, 1952, to Dorothy Kutchinsky and Jules Power, a television producer who was known for his work on children’s shows such as ABC’s “Discovery.”
“I used to find tape recorders in my dad’s junk pile in the basement in the ’50s, in the early ’60s, but I didn’t know what to do with them other than press the buttons and see what happened,” Mr. Power said in a 2023 interview with the podcast “Digging the Talks.” “And I played bad rock guitar by ear in high school.”
Mr. Power studied classical composition at Webster College (now Webster University) outside St. Louis, and received a master’s degree in jazz from Lone Mountain College in San Francisco, in his telling, because he didn’t want to get an English degree. He played in soul and funk bands as an undergraduate, telling “Digging the Talks” that the music “was part of my DNA.”
Mr. Power is survived by his sister, Robin Power.
He spent several years in San Francisco scoring television shows, including the theme music for the PBS series “Over Easy,” which ran from 1977 to 1982. Mr. Power moved to New York in 1982 and eventually found himself at Calliope, a move that would change not just his life, but also the trajectory of hip-hop for decades to come.
“I have found that the best projects and the truly groundbreaking artists have been the ones who you can’t describe quickly, because they are doing something new and different,” Mr. Power told TapeOp in 2007. “To do something in a way that hasn’t really been done before, and to have it be compelling, to get an emotional reaction on our part — that’s wonderful.”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
Sopan Deb is a Times reporter covering breaking news and culture.
The post Bob Power, Engineer and A Tribe Called Quest Collaborator, Dies at 73 appeared first on New York Times.
