The music industry’s biggest stars attended the 66th Grammy Awards in Los Angeles in attire as varied as their songs and albums. Much of that attire — whether it was a cutout gown or a sheer shirt — exposed midsections.Dua Lipa and Miley Cyrus were two of the many who chose outfits with metallic tones, perhaps in hopes of earning a golden statue to match. Gracie Abrams, Paris Jackson and others opted for black, while Kylie Minogue and Bonnie McKee were among those in red, one of the most popular colors seen on carpets this awards season. (Ms. McKee complemented her red dress with a nest of fiery hair.)Several of the night’s most memorable looks reminded viewers that there’s nothing wrong with replaying old hits. Laverne Cox, the E! host who interviewed stars on the red carpet, wore a structured Comme des Garçons dress from 2015, and Olivia Rodrigo chose a white Versace gown that is almost 10 years older than she is.The Grammy Awards are known to be a fashion playground, and this year’s event was no exception. But the following 22 looks (three of which belonged to the members of boygenius) stood out more than most, for better or worse.Miley Cyrus: Most Barbarella!Don’t send her through a metal detector.Mario Anzuoni/ReutersSome people saw Cleopatra. Others saw Barbarella, or Princess Leia in her Jabba the Hutt period. Whatever the references, the “Flowers” singer’s metal mesh by Maison Margiela was marvelous.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

The first studio album by the late ‘Meet the Woo 2’ rapper is scheduled to come out in June this year, four months after he was gunned down in a home invasion.
May 15, 2020
AceShowbiz – The highly-anticipated debut album from tragic rapper Pop Smoke will be posthumously released next month, June 2020.
The “Welcome to the Party” hitmaker had been working on the project back in February 2020 when he was fatally shot during a home invasion at his Hollywood Hills property.
50 Cent subsequently took it upon himself to complete the 20 year old’s first studio release as executive producer, and used social media to appeal to stars like Drake, Post Malone, Chris Brown, and Roddy Ricch to add features to the tracks, which he had initially hoped to drop in May.
Now Pop Smoke’s manager, Steven Victor, has revealed fans will get to hear the finished product within weeks.
He shared the album artwork on Instagram on Thursday, unveiling a shiny silver rose against a black background, and simply captioned it with the release date, writing, “June 12 2020.”
A title has yet to be announced.
Although it will serve as Pop Smoke’s first album, he previously served up two mixtapes for fans, with his most recent release, “Meet the Woo 2”, debuting at number seven on America’s Billboard 200 chart in early February, days before he was murdered.

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He was a fixture on the New York jazz scene since shortly after his arrival in 1957. He also made his mark as a composer.Curtis Fuller, a trombonist and composer whose expansive sound and powerful sense of swing made him a driving force in postwar jazz, died on May 8 at a nursing home in Detroit. He was 88.His daughter Mary Fuller confirmed the death but did not specify the cause.Mr. Fuller arrived in New York in the spring of 1957 and almost immediately became the leading trombonist of the hard-bop movement, which emphasized jazz’s roots in blues and gospel while delivering crisp and hummable melodies.By the end of the year, he had recorded no fewer than eight albums as a leader or co-leader for the independent labels Blue Note, Prestige and Savoy.That same year he also appeared on the saxophonist John Coltrane’s “Blue Train,” among the most storied albums in jazz, on which Mr. Fuller unfurls a number of timeless solos. On the title track, now a jazz standard, his trombone plays a central role in carrying the bold, declarative melody.Mr. Fuller’s five-chorus solo on “Blue Train” begins by playing off the last few notes of the trumpeter Lee Morgan’s improvisation, as if curiously picking up an object a friend had just put down. He then moves through a spontaneous repertoire of syncopated phrases and deftly wrought curlicues.In his book “Jazz From Detroit” (2019), the critic Mark Stryker wrote, “The excitement, authority and construction of Fuller’s solo explain why he became a major influence.”Mr. Fuller was also responsible for naming “Moment’s Notice,” another now-classic Coltrane composition on that album. “I made a comment,” Mr. Fuller said in a 2007 interview for the National Endowment for the Arts, recalling the scene at Van Gelder Studio in New Jersey. “‘John, you put this music on us on a moment’s notice. We got three hours to rehearse this music and we’re gonna record?’ And that became the title of the song.”Mr. Fuller carried his knack for a concisely stated melody, and for elegantly tracing the harmonic seams of a tune, into his work as a composer. Among his many original tunes are “À La Mode,” “Arabia” and “Buhaina’s Delight,” all of which are now considered standards.Those three pieces found their way into the repertoire of the drummer Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, hard bop’s flagship ensemble, of which Mr. Fuller was a core member from the early to the middle 1960s. The band was arguably at its peak in those years, when its membership included the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, the saxophonist Wayne Shorter, the pianist Cedar Walton and the bassist Jymie Merritt (later replaced by Reggie Workman).“I owe a lot to Art Blakey, in so many ways,” Mr. Fuller said. “We were all driven by the fact that he encouraged us all to write. There wasn’t such a thing as a leader.”In 2007, Mr. Fuller was named an N.E.A. Jazz Master, the country’s highest official honor for a living jazz musician.In addition to his daughter Mary, he is survived by seven other children, Ronald, Darryl, Gerald, Dellaney, Wellington, Paul and Anthony; nine grandchildren; and 13 great-grandchildren. His first marriage, to Judith Patterson, ended in divorce. His second wife, Catherine Rose Driscoll, died in 2010, after 30 years of marriage.Curtis DuBois Fuller was born in Detroit on Dec. 15, 1932. (His birth year was incorrectly reportedthroughout his life — a discrepancy that was not cleared up until after his death — partly because at 17 he had exaggerated his age by two years so that he could join the work force.)His father, John, who hailed from Jamaica, worked at a Ford Motor Company plant, but died of tuberculosis before Curtis was born. His mother, Antoinette (Heath) Fuller, a homemaker, had come north from Atlanta. She died when Curtis was 9, and he spent the next few years at an a orphanage run by Jesuits.While his mother was alive she had paid for Curtis’s sister, Mary, to receive piano lessons. He would listen through the wall, learning the fundamentals of music secondhand. He showed an interest in the violin at the orphanage but was discouraged after a teacher told him it was an unsuitable instrument for Black people to play.Soon after that, he saw J.J. Johnson, bebop’s leading trombonist, in concert alongside the saxophonist Illinois Jacquet, and he became enthralled by the trombone’s “majestic sound,” he told Mr. Stryker in an interview.“Illinois Jacquet was an act: honking and screaming, biting the reed, squealing and that stuff. The crowd would go wild,” Mr. Fuller said. “But J.J. just stood there and played, and he looked like the guy, the person who really knew what he was doing.”Mr. Fuller, center, with two of his fellow N.E.A. Jazz Masters, the saxophonists Jimmy Heath, left, and Frank Wess, at Jazz at Lincoln Center in 2011.Chad Batka for The New York TimesHe was also impressed by the local trombonist Frank Rosolino, whom he heard perform soon after, and who became his teacher. He fell in with a coterie of young jazz musicians in Detroit, many of whom were destined for jazz prominence, including the pianist Barry Harris and the guitarist Kenny Burrell.“That was like a network in Detroit; we generally stuck together,” he said in 2007. “There was a lot of love and real closeness.”In 1953 Mr. Fuller was drafted into the Army, where he joined one of the last all-Black military bands, whose other members included the future stars Cannonball Adderley and Junior Mance.After leaving the armed forces, he returned to the Detroit scene before traveling to New York in 1957 with the saxophonist Yusef Lateef’s band. When Miles Davis offered him a job, he decided to stay.Playing with Davis led to his meeting two particularly important people: Coltrane, who was the band’s tenor saxophonist, and Alfred Lion, a founder of Blue Note Records, who heard Mr. Fuller onstage with Davis’s band and invited him to record for the label.As he began to make his name as a bandleader, Mr. Fuller also found work alongside prominent musicians including Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie and James Moody.Holiday, who became a mentor, encouraged him to bear in mind the range and pacing of his own speaking voice when he improvised. “When I came to New York, I always tried to impress people, play long solos as fast as I could — lightning fast,” Mr. Fuller said in 2007. “And all of a sudden Billie Holiday said, ‘When you play, you’re talking to people. So learn how to edit your thing, you know?’ I learned to do that.”In 1959, Savoy released “The Curtis Fuller Jazztet,” a lively album that included the saxophonist and composer Benny Golson as a featured guest. Soon after, Mr. Golson and the trumpeter Art Farmer began a separate band under the Jazztet name, with Mr. Fuller as a side musician. It would be one of the quintessential jazz ensembles of the 1960s, but Mr. Fuller soon moved on to other endeavors. (He and Mr. Golson remained close friends until his death.)The untimely deaths of Coltrane, who was also a dear friend, and Mr. Fuller’s sister in 1967 sent him into a depression, and he left the music business, taking a job with the Chrysler Corporation in downtown Manhattan. But about a year later, Gillespie persuaded Mr. Fuller to join his band for a world tour, and he re-entered the jazz scene for good. He spent two years in Count Basie’s orchestra in the mid-1970s, and also returned to leading his own ensembles.In the 1990s, he survived a bout with lung cancer (despite never having been a smoker) and had part of one lung removed. He spent two years reinventing his trombone technique to accommodate his compromised breathing power. He succeeded, and released a string of well-received albums in the late 1990s and 2000s.But as his health continued to deteriorate he turned more attention to teaching, joining the faculty at the University of Hartford’s Hartt School of Music and at the Kennedy Center’s Betty Carter Jazz Ahead program.Asked in 2007 to describe the signature sound that had left such an indelible mark on jazz, Mr. Fuller mentioned the importance of embracing one’s distinct identity. “I try to be warm. Warm and effective, you know. And sometimes I’m cold and defective,” he said. “That’s the way water runs. I’m not God, I’m not perfection. I’m just me.” More

The former assistant will be questioned by Mr. Combs’s lawyers, who say her account of sex abuse and violence is at odds with the warmth she showed him on social media.The federal trial of Sean Combs is entering its fourth week, the midpoint of what is expected to be an eight-week trial, with prosecutors still filling out the particulars of a case that charges the music mogul with sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy.Jurors have heard from 21 witnesses in support of the government’s case that Mr. Combs was a violent and abusive man who controlled, intimidated and sexually violated women, and that he directed employees to commit arson, bribery, forced labor, obstruction of justice and other crimes on his behalf as part of a “criminal enterprise.”Mr. Combs has pleaded not guilty to all charges against him, and his lawyers have strongly denied that any of his sexual arrangements were nonconsensual, arguing that the women who are part of the government’s case willingly consented to sex with Mr. Combs. If convicted of all charges, Mr. Combs, 55, could face life in prison.The witnesses in the case so far have included Casandra Ventura, the singer known as Cassie, who said she had been coerced intro drug-fueled sex marathons, and a former assistant, testifying under the pseudonym “Mia,” who said that her boss sexually assaulted her and subjected her to sleep deprivation and violence.Another witness, Deonte Nash, a stylist, described witnessing Mr. Combs’s violent attacks on Ms. Ventura, and said she told him that Mr. Combs had threatened to release explicit videos of her with other men in “freak-offs,” the sexual encounters that are at the heart of the government’s case. Ms. Ventura had called those videos “blackmail materials.”At a news conference at the White House on Friday, President Trump said that, if asked, he was open to reviewing a possible pardon for Mr. Combs — whom he crossed paths with decades ago on the celebrity scene in New York — if he was convicted.“I would certainly look at the facts,” Mr. Trump said.Mia, who testified on Thursday and Friday last week, will return to the stand on Monday for what should be the conclusion of her testimony. Under cross-examination on Friday, Brian Steel, a lawyer for Mr. Combs, showed Mia dozens of social media posts in which she repeatedly expressed affection and admiration for the music mogul. Mr. Steel asked how she could write such things if he had also abused her in the way she said.“I was young and manipulated and just eager to survive,” Mia said.The next witnesses suggest the government will further examine the circumstances of freak-offs. One witness, Eddy Garcia, was a supervisor at an InterContinential Hotel in Los Angeles, where a security camera recorded Mr. Combs attacking Ms. Ventura in 2016. Another expected witness, Frank Piazza, is a forensic video expert who examined that hotel footage. Other expected witnesses include Sylvia Okun, a hotel custodian, and a man named Enrique Santos. More

As the founder of the independent label Specialty Records, he helped set the table for the rock ’n’ roll era by signing performers like Little Richard.Art Rupe, the founder of Specialty Records, an innovative independent label based in Los Angeles that brought rhythm and blues into the mainstream and helped set the table for the rock ’n’ roll era with singers like Little Richard and Lloyd Price, died on Friday at his home in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 104.His death was announced by his daughter, Beverly Rupe Schwarz.Mr. Rupe created Specialty in 1946 with a niche audience in mind (hence the name). The major labels of the time, focused on mass-market pop hits, ignored the urbanized, blues-based music that appealed to Black audiences in the big cities. Mr. Rupe hoped to capitalize on this oversight by showcasing acts with “a big-band sound expressed in a churchy way,” as he put it to Arnold Shaw, the author of “Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues” (1978).In the late 1940s and early ’50s, artists like Roy Milton, Percy Mayfield and Joe Liggins consistently put Specialty in the Top 10 of what were known as the “race record” charts until Billboard magazine began using the term “rhythm and blues” in 1949. In 1952, on a scouting trip to New Orleans, Mr. Rupe recorded Lloyd Price, then 19, singing his own composition, “Lawdy Miss Clawdy.” That record, which featured Fats Domino on piano, became the top-selling R&B record of the year and broke through to white listeners, too.Mr. Rupe hit one of rock ’n’ roll’s mother lodes when he signed Richard Penniman, known professionally as Little Richard, on the strength of a scratchy audition tape. SpecialtyThree years later, Mr. Rupe hit one of rock ’n’ roll’s mother lodes when he signed Richard Penniman, known professionally as Little Richard, on the strength of a scratchy audition tape. During a lunch break at a recording session in New Orleans, Little Richard sat down at the piano and shouted out a risqué song he used in his nightclub act: “Tutti Frutti.” With hastily rewritten lyrics, the song became one of rock’s early classics, and the first in a string of Little Richard hits that included “Long Tall Sally,” “Slippin’ and Slidin’,” “Rip It Up,” “Lucille,” “Keep a-Knockin’” and “Good Golly, Miss Molly.”“Art Rupe had a tremendous impact on rock ’n’ roll,” said John Broven, the author of “Record Makers and Breakers” (2009), a history of early rock ’n’ roll’s independent record producers. “‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy’ was really the first record to cross over and reach a teenage white audience, and then came Little Richard with ‘Tutti-Frutti’ and ‘Long Tall Sally.’ These were monumental records that almost created rock ’n’ roll in themselves.”Art Rupe was born Arthur Newton Goldberg on Sept. 5, 1917, in Greensburg, Pa., a suburb of Pittsburgh, and grew up in nearby McKeesport, where his father, David, was a salesman at a secondhand furniture store and his mother, Anna, was a music lover. After attending Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Miami University in Ohio, he moved to Los Angeles in 1939.He enrolled in business courses at U.C.L.A. with the idea of entering the film business; he also changed his last name to Rupe after being told by a relative that it had been the family’s original surname in Europe. After World War II broke out, he worked at a local shipyard on an engineering crew that tested Liberty ships.The movie business, he found, was tough to enter, and he shifted his attention to the recording industry. Responding to a newspaper ad, he invested $2,500 in a new label, Atlas Records, which lost most of his money and failed to produce hits by its two main artists, Nat King Cole and Frankie Laine.Roy Milton and His Solid Senders in a publicity photo. Mr. Milton, standing, a jump-blues singer, recorded numerous Top 10 R&B hits for Specialty.Courtesy of Colin EscottAfter selling his interest in Atlas for $600, Mr. Rupe created his own company, Juke Box Records, in 1944. “I called it Juke Box because the jukebox was the medium then for plugging records,” he told Arnold Shaw. “If you got a record into the boxes, it was tantamount to getting it on the top stations today.”Mr. Rupe was methodical. He bought $200 worth of race records and, stopwatch in hand, began analyzing musical structure, tempo and even titles to identify the common characteristics of the best-selling releases. Since the word “boogie” appeared in a disproportionate number of hit songs, Juke Box’s first record, an instrumental by the Sepia Tones, was given the title “Boogie No. 1.” It sold a more than respectable 70,000 copies, and Mr. Rupe was on his way.The jump-blues singer Roy Milton and his band, the Solid Senders, gave Juke Box its first big hit: “R.M. Blues,” released in 1945, which was said to have sold a million copies. Mr. Milton went on to record nearly 20 Top 10 R&B hits after following Mr. Rupe to Specialty, which he founded the next year after breaking with his Juke Box partners.In 1950 the pianist and bandleader Joe Liggins gave Specialty its first No. 1 hit, “Pink Champagne,” which became the top-selling R&B record of the year. Percy Mayfield, a singer and songwriter with a relaxed, swinging style who would later contribute “Hit the Road, Jack” and other songs to Ray Charles’s repertoire, topped the charts a year later with “Please Send Me Someone to Love.” Guitar Slim gave the label yet another No. 1 hit in 1954 with “The Things That I Used to Do,” one of the earliest records to put the electric guitar front and center.“Specialty was a little like the Blue Note label in jazz,” said the singer and music historian Billy Vera, who produced “The Specialty Story,” a boxed set of the label’s best sides released in 1994, and wrote “Rip It Up: The Specialty Records Story,” published in 2019. “Art was dollar conscious, but he did not let that stop him from going into the better studios and taking the time to rehearse. He took great pride and care to make quality records with quality musicians.”Specialty exerted a powerful influence on the British invasion bands of the 1960s, and even its second-tier acts had a ripple effect. Larry Williams, a New Orleans singer groomed by Specialty to fill the void when Little Richard left the music business in 1957, had solid hits with “Short Fat Fannie” and “Bony Moronie,” but even his lesser singles made an impression overseas. His single “She Said Yeah” was covered by the Rolling Stones and the Animals. The Beatles recorded three of his songs: “Bad Boy,” “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” and “Slow Down.” Don and Dewey, another Specialty act, never had a hit, but their sound greatly influenced the Righteous Brothers and Sam and Dave.Mr. Rupe, a longtime fan of gospel music, quickly made Specialty’s gospel division an industry leader, signing the Pilgrim Travelers, the Swan Silvertones, Alex Bradford, Brother Joe May and Sister Wynona Carr. Two of the label’s most famous gospel groups generated crossover stars for other labels: Sam Cooke became a pop star after leaving the Soul Stirrers, as did Lou Rawls, who recorded with the Chosen Gospel Singers.Mr. Cooke was the one that got away. In 1956, he recorded a pop tune, “Lovable,” produced by Specialty’s Bumps Blackwell with a lush background chorus and released with the singer’s name thinly disguised as Dale Cook. Mr. Rupe disliked the smooth pop treatment and let Mr. Blackwell and Mr. Cooke leave the label with the other recordings from that session in hand. One song, “You Send Me,” became a chart-topping hit and ignited Mr. Cooke’s remarkable career.“In all candor, I did not think ‘You Send Me’ was that great,” Mr. Rupe told an interviewer for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2011. “I never dreamed it would be a multimillion seller.”Mr. Rupe in 2019. He sold Specialty’s catalog in 1990 and created the Arthur N. Rupe Foundation in 1991.Rauh Jewish Archives, Heinz History CenterBy 1960, Mr. Rupe was growing disenchanted with the record business, particularly with the widespread system of payola, which required record companies to pay off disc jockeys and distributors to get their records heard.Increasingly, he let assistants like Harold Battiste, in New Orleans, and Sonny Bono, in Los Angeles, produce and market the label’s records. In 1990, he sold Specialty’s catalog to Fantasy RecordsWhile still at Specialty, Mr. Rupe invested successfully in oil and real estate and started his own oil company. In 1991 he created the Arthur N. Rupe Foundation, whose stated goals include “achieving positive social change by shining the light of truth on critical and controversial issues” and providing support for caregivers of people with dementia.In addition to his daughter — from the second of his three marriages, to Lee Apostoleris, which ended in divorce — Mr. Rupe is survived by a granddaughter; a step-grandson; and two step-great-granddaughters. His third wife, Dorothy Rupe, and three siblings died before him.In 2011, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame gave Mr. Rupe the Ahmet Ertegun Award for Lifetime Achievement, an honor given to record-company executives.“When I got into the business, few white people fooled around with this kind of music,” Mr. Rupe told Arnold Shaw. “I had no idea that it would ever appeal to so many white people.” More