The trailblazing music engineer passed away on March 1. No cause of death has been revealed.
DJ Premier announced Power’s passing on social media, praising his contributions to several classic albums.
“R.I.P. to one of the iLLest Engineers of all time…Mr. BOB POWER,” his March 2 post read. “Thank you for your various pointers in recording from D’Angelo to ATCQ’S Low End Theory, Erykah Badu’s Baduizm, and so on!”
Questlove also honored Power in an Instagram post.
”You could NOT encounter a more engaging, enthusiastic, laser-focused craftsman of sound and Sonic’s (engineer/mixing/production),” Questlove began. “I mean, he’d let me bug him ad nauseam about ‘what does this button do? that button?’ Bob was our training wheels for how to present music.”
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“I’m so devastated by his passing. Thank you for changing all of our lives, Bob,” the artist concluded.
According to his NYU profile (in which he served as an arts professor), during his decades-long career, Power worked on iconic albums like A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory, D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar, and Erykah Badu’s Baduizm, all expertly engineered in New York studios.
After earning degrees in music theory and jazz, Power began scoring music for television and advertisements. In the mid-1980s, he started engineering at New York’s Calliope Studios, where he worked on Stetsasonic’s album On Fire. He became the main producer for the Native Tongues collective, known especially for his work on A Tribe Called Quest’s album The Low End Theory.
Power revolutionized the art of blending intricate sample-based arrangements with deep, clear bass. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, he collaborated on projects with artists like Erykah Badu, D’Angelo, Me’Shell Ndegéocello, The Roots, Tony! Toni! Toné!, Common, and De La Soul.
Meanwhile, Power built a successful career composing music for advertising. He created and produced music for major clients such as Coca-Cola, Mercedes, Casio, AT&T, Sprite, the U.S. Postal Service, Hasbro, Duracell, Intel, and the American Cancer Society.
Power also enjoyed a prolific career as a television composer. Some highlights include creating the theme music for the Emmy Award-winning PBS series Over Easy. He also composed the original theme and score for Disney’s family series The Scheme of Things. His other notable TV credits include the theme and score for the prime-time special Four Alone: The Older Woman in America, the NEH-funded documentary The State of the Language, and music for the Lifetime Channel and Disney’s Imagine.
Power’s work earned him more than 40 chart records, more than 20 gold or platinum certifications, and 2 Grammy nominations. As an engineer and mixer, his contributions are enshrined in both the Grammy Hall of Fame and the U.S. National Recording Registry.
Before his passing, Power served as an Associate Arts Professor at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music.