We don’t talk about engineers much. Part of this is my college degree talking - shoutout to my Music Production and Engineering majors - but even inside of the degree’s name, there’s a reason “engineer” gets second billing. Mic placement and knob twisting just doesn’t have the same glory to it compared to production. It’s the nerd side of the arts. And there’s an art to it.

If Rick Rubin was the producer I first realized was all over too many of my favorite records across genres, Bob Power was the equivalent engineer.

I didn’t want a death to be the thing that reminded me to explore production AND engineering alongside one another, but here we are. There’s an appreciation of both the art and science of these terms and I’m way overdue to explore.

Let’s celebrate Bob Power.

Bob Power was the guy who was willing to take hip-hop sessions seriously in the late 80s and early 90s. That might not sound significant but you have to think of why, and then you’ll start to see the downstream effects.

The first rap songs were live bands playing what a DJ/producer would sample and loop. Then, rap albums progressed to their more sample-centric era. Some producers were a little frustrated how the canned samples played on records.

The technology and the creativity were running with each other in a totally new musical direction. Pause to appreciate that reality for a moment. Give it an extra beat to think about where we are now with technology and creativity too.

Deep breath. Ok. Let’s go back to 1984.

Bob Power, with a music theory degree and a master’s in jazz, had been in New York City for a couple of years. The owner of Calliope Studios asks him to come be an engineer for a nationally unknown but locally celebrated Brooklyn rap group called Stetsasonic. They were a band, they were mixing up samples with instruments, and they were ambitious beyond their recognition.

This is the session when Powers gets on the radar, via being a part of the scene that was Calliope Studios in that era, of people like Prince Paul (who was in Stetsasonic), and the rest of the emerging Native Tongues projects (like A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Jungle Brothers, Black Sheep, and more).

Power became the trusted engineer for any artist and label doing work in rap/hip-hop at Calliope Studios.

Q-Tip and Ali Shaheed Muhammad immediately started insisting that Powers be their engineer for anything they worked on. The translation of their jazz samples into feeling like a natural composition - it makes sense in hindsight, but I can’t stress enough what a feat this was for Power to pull off. Listen, on headphones, and catch the immersion into the atmosphere they achieved on a track like “Bonita Applebum”:

The real pull through though came on the next Tribe record. They had the crazy idea to get jazz legend Ron Carter to play live bass alongside the samples, drum machines, and vocals. How do you get so many sources into the same sonic setting, and not have anything feel out of place?

This is the bridge, and you can hear it when it happens, not only between digital and analogue, but as a two way street where, thanks to the genius and ambitions of Q-Tip, the rest of the world started to become aware of how you could go back and forth between these two worlds seamlessly. “Buggin’ Out” is as good a place as any to hear it:

More records came, and they came with deeper and denser collages. By De La Soul’s Buhloone Mind State, Powers had expanded his skill set to a whole new level. Check out “I Am I Be” with James Brown extracted (and live recorded) Maceo Parker, Fred Wesley, and Pee Wee Ellis on it:

The Roots of course took note too. Their debut album had Power as an engineer. He was getting vocal shoutouts too (which, very candidly, THIS is where I learned his name and then started to realize how he was EVERYWHERE). Check out “Distortion to Static” and listen for the lyric:

Working with The Roots meant further crossovers with Q-Tip and the emergent Soulquarians scene. The live instrument + sampled sounds + in your headphones and in a whole vibe atmosphere was his specialty. This is the sound of my late 90s.

Notice how the artists were as obsessed with the bridge as Powers was. Here’s “Brown Sugar” by D’Angelo and “On & On” by Erykah Badu.

And the level of Power’s appreciation for what he could bring to the table, in somewhat more traditional spaces, hear the sounds on the Me’shell Ndegeocello album Peace Beyond Passion, which earned him a Grammy Nomination. Here’s “Who Is He And What Is He To You”:

By the end of the 90s and into the 2000s, Bob Power made the sound of The Roots and Erykah Badu, “You Got Me”, Common’s “The Light” (which, I’ll come back to in a moment), India Arie’s “Video”, and Ozomatli’s “1,2,3,4” (which features De La Soul, and you can see the loyalty he engendered here, right?):

Bob Power was part of the sound. Bob Power was part of the scene. He was part of the connective tissue between music theory, jazz, and the sampling technology that would revolutionize music and culture.

He kept the life in it. The people doing the creating recognized that skill set and kept him around. And, especially as evidenced by his role in the Soulquarians, he helped enable the two-way reality of artists who influence the technology and technologies who influence the artists, alongside Dilla.

Bob Power was 73. His contribution is immeasurable. RIP.