How Rebekah Foster of Ujima Sound Productions Built A Legendary Career

What do Sarah Vaughn, Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie, Bobby Blue Bland, Prince, Queen Latifah, Eric Clapton, Boogie Down Productions, Whitney Houston, A Tribe Called Quest,  Marcus Miller, Steel Pulse, OutKast, Tony Bennett and Naughty By Nature, among many others, have in common (aside from being some of the greatest artists of our time)? Rebekah Foster.

Foster is a Bronx-based audio engineer by trade, who for more than 35 years worked front of house, back of house, and in every nook and cranny at a variety of houses. This includes working at performance temples like Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center and The Apollo Theater as well as top festivals like Glastonbury, Montreux Jazz Festival and Lollapalooza and hundreds and hundreds of other venues. She’s also a tour manager, production manager and road manger who most recently worked with Stevie Wonder on his phenomenal FireAid set.  It’s an amazing career by any standard, more so considering her background and the institutional bias she faced working her way up the live industry ladder.

“I’m a black woman and I was one of like three female engineers at the time. Period,” Foster says of her rise beginning in the 1980s. “It was tough and there was built-in racism, but we learned as we went and it was great and we made it happen.”

One of Foster’s primary inspirations was her father, Reverend Wendell Foster, who was a pastor in the church, worked in theater and was a city councilman. “He came up during the time with Sydney Poitier and Harry Belafonte. His best friend was (actor, director) Ossie Davis and William Greaves, the filmmaker, they’re all from that era,” Foster says. “Linda Hopkins was my godmother, she’s an old-school blues singer and had a show on Broadway called “Me and Bessie.” We grew up knowing (entertainers) Clarice Taylor, Freda Payne, Ruby Dee and he was one of the people who helped start the National Black Theater.”

Coming up in the Bronx, Foster says she DJ’d before going off to boarding school in Maine where she continued to DJ and started up an audio department. She would end up attending Institute of Audio Research and interned at PowerPlay Studios.

One of Foster’s earliest tentpole moments came when her parents fully appreciated the work she was doing.

“My father would call me Dracula,” she says. “He was like, ‘I don’t understand why you have to work all night till 4:00 a.m. in the morning and sleep all day and then get up.’ The Dracula thing didn’t work for him. That was when I took them to the Colden Center in Queens, where I was working with Sarah Vaughan. And he said, ‘I finally get it.’ He saw my name in the Playbill and once that happened, they got it and that was all the validation I needed.”

Another career milestone occurred when she was doing sound for jazz legend Sonny Rollins and a certain would-be hip-hop legend happened to see the show, which would lead to her working with a number of hip-hop luminaries.

“While doing Sonny Rollins at a gig, KRS-1 came to the show and he just came up to the soundboard and was like, ‘I want my bass to sound like that live.’ And then we met. I started doing the studio stuff and then when he went on the road, I would do the live stuff. So I have gold albums and all that from recordings, but I like the live thing. So I was with Boogie Down Productions. And then 1991, I left Boogie Down Productions. Not 24 hours later Queen Latifah’s manager called me and said, “I heard you left BDP. It was not even 24 hours.” And then two days later, I went on tour with her on the Public Enemy tour.”

Foster goes on to mention becoming friends with the late great hip-hop executive Chris Lighty, working with A Tribe Called Quest during their classic Instinctive Travels and The Paths of Rhythm album.

Other tent pole moments for Foster, whose career includes a preponderance of jazz and hip-hop artists, was working on “The Legends Tour” with Joe Sample, Eric Clapton, Steve Gadd and David Sanborn as well as working with Naughty By Nature.

“I met them through Latifah, she was managing them” Foster says of the “O.P.P.” hit makers. “The very first tour we could all only fit on one bus. That’s how many of us there were. But they pulled up two extra buses, and everybody on the block that could get on the bus got on the bus to come on the tour. They were the original posse even before Hammer did it. They let everybody that wanted to get on the bus and wanted to come on the tour come on the tour.”

Other career highlights include starting her own company, Ujima Sound Productions Limited as well as paying her experiences forward. “Every year since I started, I’ve hired interns. Kids that might not ever get off the block. My record is pretty good, to see that so many of them are working for A-list artists right now, which is wonderful.”

Foster says that many of the DEI efforts of the last few years never really took hold in the live industry. “There’s not any DEI for Trump to cancel,” she says. “It worked for a little bit, but for the most part, it was incremental. It was like dropping a stone in the lake and the ripples go a little bit, but then they fade away. And that’s what happened.” 

To help ameliorate this inequality, Foster is on the advisory board of Roadies of Color, which works to promote a more diverse, equitable and inclusive live industry. “If it wasn’t for Roadies of Color,” she says, “the little bit of inroads we made would not be happening.”

And throughout it all, she continues to further her father’s legacy at the Christ Church in the Bronx.  “I am still a member and take care of the day-to-day operations and run the food pantry,” she says—spoken like a true legend.