Bob Power Dies at 74; Famed Engineer Worked With A Tribe Called Quest, D’Angelo and More

Revered engineer/producer Bob Power, who worked on classic albums by A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Erykah Badu, The Roots and D’Angelo, has died at age 74. His death was confirmed by NYU's Clive Davis Institute, where Power worked as a professor.

Power helped shape the sound of 1990s hip-hop and R&B. He engineered A Tribe Called Quest's acclaimed second album, The Low End Theory, and would go on to work on De La Soul Is Dead, D'Angelo's Brown Sugar, Badu's Baduizm, and The Roots projects like Do You Want More?!!!??! and Things Fall Apart.

Badu paid tribute to Power on social media."What a great loss for the music community today," she wrote on IG. "The great engineer, producer, mentor and friend @bobpower has traveled 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."

Born in Chicago but raised in Rye, New York, young Bob Power was a guitarist who eventually would go on to study classical theory and composition at Webster College. He became a session musician in San Francisco, where he also enrolled in a master's program and studied jazz. He also started composing music for television.

He would subsequently start working at Calliope Studios and was asked to fill in as an engineer. "Very quickly, I said, 'Uh, uh, yeah, I can do that. I know how to do that,'" he said in a Red Bull Academy interview back in 2014. "That was the beginning of my commercial engineering career. De La Soul and Tribe Called Quest were some of the first people I remember coming through there and meeting."

"You could NOT encounter a more engaging, enthusiastic, laser-focused craftsman of sound and sonics," Questlove wrote on Instagram. "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. I'm so devastated by his passing. Thank you for changing all of our lives, Bob."

A funeral listing stated that Power died on Sunday, March 1. No cause of death was given.