Bob Power, recording engineer for the Roots and A Tribe Called Quest, dies at 73

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Bob Power, a musician and engineer who worked closely with some of the top hip-hop and R&B acts of the 1990s and 2000s — including De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, the Roots and Meshell Ndegeocello — died Sunday.He was 73.His death was announced by Okayplayer, the music platform founded by the Roots’ Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, which didn’t state a cause or say where Power died.Shouted out by name in the Roots’ song “Distortion to Static” — “Coming to New York to mix / It’s Bob Power with the snares and kicks to fix,” Black Thought rapped — Power was widely admired for the oomph he brought to drums and for how crisply he was able to thread samples into a production.

Among the classic records he helped create were “De La Soul Is Dead,” Tribe’s “The Low End Theory,” D’Angelo’s “Brown Sugar,” Badu’s “Baduizm” and Common’s “Like Water for Chocolate.”“Bob was the KING of the Low End,” Questlove wrote Monday on Instagram.Before Power, “Hip Hop was chaotic & muddy,” Questlove added.

“but man—when Bob entered our sonic sphere? Jesus.”In a post on X, DJ Premier described Power as “one of the iLLest Engineers of all time”; Young Guru, an engineer known for his long relationship with Jay-Z, called Power “an absolute legend” on Instagram and said he was “the man who I patterned my sound after.” Power was nominated for two Grammys for his work on Ndegeocello’s “Peace Beyond Passion” and India.Arie’s “Acoustic Soul,” and he was an arts professor at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music.Robert Power was born in Chicago in 1952 and grew up outside New York City.He started playing guitar as a kid, according to a timeline on his website, after his sister got a guitar to play “Blowin’ in the Wind” and he had the “idea to play it loude...