If you were buying records in the 1990s — and actually reading the liner notes — there was a name you started seeing over and over again: Bob Power.
A Tribe Called Quest. The Roots. D’Angelo. Erykah Badu. De La Soul. Common. Meshell Ndegeocello. All turned to Bob for their iconic recordings.
These were records that helped redefine what hip-hop and soul could sound like, and that drew the line between jazz and hiphop.
Bob Power — the recording engineer and producer who helped shape the sound of modern hip-hop and soul — died this week.
When I visited him in his Manhattan studio a few years ago for my podcast The Third Story, I asked him what he thought his contribution had really been.
“I think the sound of what I did,” he told me, “was that I cared.”
That might sound modest. But it wasn’t.
Because when Power started engineering hip-hop sessions in the late 1980s, many people in the recording establishment didn’t take the music seriously.
It wasn’t made the way records had traditionally been made.
It relied on drum machines and samples - fragments of other records. Some engineers dismissed it. Power didn’t.
He simply approached it like any other music worth making — with attention, curiosity, and respect.
“I applied the same rules of something sounding really good to hip-hop as I would to any other kind of music,” he told me.
To him, the new music wasn’t a problem. It was a puzzle.
“When I saw the amazing constructions these people were making,” he said, “I thought, this stuff’s really amazing.”
Power had actually started his career as a musician. He had degrees in classical composition and jazz performance.
When he moved to New York in the early 1980s, he was still playing wedding gigs and composing television music while slowly finding his way into the studio world.
The studio where he first engineered sessions happened to be one of the cheapest in town. Which meant the most interesting music kept coming through the door: Latin dance records, house music, and eventually hip-hop.
Power believed that innovative music often comes from people who don’t know the rules.
“Great music is made by people who either don’t care or don’t understand what is normal,” he told me. “So they do something extraordinary.”
Later in life he became a teacher at NYU, where he tried to pass that philosophy along to a new generation of producers and musicians. His advice was simple: don’t try to do everything. Find the one thing that is uniquely yours.
“Show the one thing that you do that no one else can do,” he said. “And then find every way in the world to exploit it.”
Despite his extraordinary gift for coaxing depth and dimension out of his recordings, in Bob Power’s case, that one thing might not have been specifically musical or technical.
It might have been his empathy. The way he cared, his willingness to listen closely and without judgement, to solve the problem and to treat people around him with dignity. To serve the sound.
You can hear our full Third Story podcast conversation HERE.
Rest in peace, Bob. And rest in Power.
