Aurelia Butler

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    Sean Combs, Music Mogul Known as Diddy, Is Arrested After Grand Jury Indictment

    The music mogul has been under mounting scrutiny since a 2023 lawsuit by his former girlfriend, Cassie, accused him of sex trafficking and years of abuse. Mr. Combs’s representatives called him an “innocent man.”Sean Combs, the music mogul whose career has been upended by sexual assault lawsuits and a federal investigation, was arrested at a Manhattan hotel on Monday evening after a grand jury indicted him.The indictment is sealed and the charges were not announced but Marc Agnifilo, a lawyer for Mr. Combs, said he believed he was being charged with racketeering and sex trafficking.A statement from Mr. Combs’s legal team said they were disappointed with the decision to prosecute him and noted that he had been cooperative with the investigation and had “voluntarily relocated to New York last week in anticipation of these charges.”“Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs is a music icon, self-made entrepreneur, loving family man, and proven philanthropist who has spent the last 30 years building an empire, adoring his children, and working to uplift the Black community,” the statement said. “He is an imperfect person but he is not a criminal.”Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement posted on social media late Monday that “we expect to move to unseal the indictment in the morning and will have more to say at that time.”Mr. Agnifilo said Mr. Combs had been arrested by officers with Homeland Security Investigations at about 8:30 p.m. at the hotel where he was staying, the Park Hyatt New York on 57th Street. It is expected he will be held overnight and then arraigned on Tuesday.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

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    Oscar Contenders Emerge After Film Festival Season

    After film festivals in Venice, Telluride and Toronto, a slate of contenders has emerged. Still, there are few front-runners.Fall foliage may still be weeks away, but the tea leaves of Oscar season are ready to be read.Now that festivals in Venice, Telluride and Toronto have concluded and all but a handful of this year’s contenders have had their first public peek-out, the story is beginning to come into focus. And unlike the last two years, which were dominated by the season-long sweepers “Oppenheimer” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” this race seems much more wide open.Still, two movies already look like significant contenders across the board. One is “Conclave,” a handsomely mounted thriller about sneaky cardinals plotting to pick a new pope. It premiered at Telluride and stars Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci. Some of my fellow journalists sniffed that “Conclave” was just a potboiler with prestige trappings, but I think that’s exactly what will appeal to Oscar voters, who love to reward a rip-roaring yarn as long as it’s well-made with a soupçon of social-issue relevance. Directed by Edward Berger, whose “All Quiet on the Western Front” won four Academy Awards, “Conclave” could be a big hit with audiences, too.If Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” felt like the biggest movie of Venice, that’s in part because of its mammoth 215-minute run time, which comes complete with a 15-minute intermission. There’s no denying the outsize ambition of this film, which was shot on the old-fashioned VistaVision format and chronicles the epic tribulations of a Jewish architect (Adrien Brody) as he emigrates to America after World War II. Expect plenty of awards recognition for Corbet and supporting performers Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones, as well as a surefire Oscar nomination for Brody, who somehow still holds the record for the youngest best-actor winner after taking that Oscar at 29 for “The Pianist.”Two buzzy performances from big stars also debuted in Venice. Daniel Craig looks likely to earn his first Oscar nomination, for Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer,” in which he plays an American expat besotted with a young man in midcentury Mexico City. And Nicole Kidman won the best actress award at Venice for the erotic “Babygirl,” which also finds her falling for a younger man. (Perhaps age-gap romances are the new Oscar bait.)The Venice trophy will help Kidman build a case for her sixth Oscar nomination (she won for “The Hours”), though she’ll face a surplus of strong lead-actress contenders who also emerged from the fall fests: Angelina Jolie as the opera diva Maria Callas in “Maria”; the Brazilian star Fernanda Torres in “I’m Still Here”; Marianne Jean-Baptiste as a mouthy malcontent in Mike Leigh’s “Hard Truths”; and the double act of Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore in Pedro Almodóvar’s empathetic “The Room Next Door,” which won the top prize in Venice, the Golden Lion.The director Jason Reitman has crafted a crowd-pleaser in “Saturday Night,” a comedy about the chaotic backstage negotiations that preceded the debut episode of “Saturday Night Live,” though its wide Oct. 11 release will have to go well if the movie hopes to sustain the momentum it earned from Telluride and Toronto. “Joker: Folie à Deux” has the opposite problem: Though this sequel to the billion-dollar hit is certain to make money when it’s released next month, it was coolly received by Venice critics and will face a much more uncertain awards future than its predecessor.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

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    Hollywood Has Enough Fake Accents. Bring Back the Weird Voices.

    David Lynch’s voice is unmistakable — and a national treasure. The world of film deserves more like it.“Something is coming along for you to see and hear,” mewled the filmmaker David Lynch in a video posted online this past spring. The clip was a teaser for a music project, and it caught the eye via the director’s old-school cool — his shades and upswept silver locks, framed in close-up. But it was another bit of business that actually held attention: the jangle and blare of Lynch’s reedy voice.Larger-than-life screen personalities are necessarily watchable. Some also prove mysteriously listenable. Lynch is among them, a member of the small pantheon of filmmakers whose mystique is partly indebted to the textures of their speech: the gorgeous intonations of Orson Welles, the reminiscing tones of Agnès Varda, the runaway-train enthusiasm of Quentin Tarantino.Over his long career, Lynch has offered his own locomotive thrills. It begins with that unmistakable voice — what the director Mel Brooks once called his “kind of crazy Midwestern accent.” In fact, Lynch’s family moved frequently, and his childhood unfurled across a wide swath of midcentury America. Along the way, his voice settled into a faintly comic register: thin and tremulous, with a hint of helium, containing both the threat of a whine and the chirpy approachability of an archetypal 1950s suburbia.Lynch is a raconteur of some renown; he has spoken of Wookiees, decaying factories and an overfed Chihuahua who resembled “a water balloon with little legs.” He enjoys folksy turns of phrase (“Golden sunshine all along the way,” he often declared in the online weather reports he used to offer) and intriguing maxims (“A washed butt never boils”). Ideas, he argues, are pre-existing “gifts” that artists can “catch.” You can sense a similar pursuit in his interviews: At times he speaks as if he were reciting the words of a dimly heard incoming transmission, wiggling his fingers and shutting his eyes. Even his mundane remarks can take on an air of profundity, ringing persistently in the mind.And sometimes, the ears. Lynch “has to have his megaphone to make his voice sound even more nasal,” the actress Naomi Watts once said, describing his on-set carnival barking. “When he’s two feet away from you as well.” He’s liable to stretch out words like “beautiful,” imbuing them with the deep emotion of an explorer bringing home tales of briefly glimpsed miracles. His born-in-the-’40s diction makes matters even stranger: Lynch, a self-identified Eagle Scout, can be heard in one documentary repeatedly and earnestly exclaiming, “Oh my golly.”Lynch ‘has to have his megaphone to make his voice sound even more nasal.’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

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    A (Very) Belated Donizetti Premiere in South Africa

    The 1838 score for “Dalinda,” which uses chunks of “Lucrezia Borgia,” was found in Naples in 2019. A student company in Cape Town just gave the first staged performance.“Could Donizetti ever have imagined that the world premiere of one of his operas would take place in Africa?”That’s the question Jeremy Silver, the director of Opera UCT, a student company from the University of Cape Town, posed to the audience before the first staged performance of “Dalinda” on Sept. 4.But here it was, an opera discovered just a few years earlier — presented not at an ornate European opera house but at the Baxter Theater, built in the 1970s, and performed by Opera UCT with a cast largely comprising Black singers and supertitles in English and IsiXhosa.The rediscovery of “Dalinda” is a musical detective story with its origins in Donizetti’s frustration at failing to get his opera “Lucrezia Borgia” past the censors in Naples, where he was resident at the Teatro di San Carlo. The composer of “Lucia di Lammermoor,” “La Fille du Regiment” and “Don Pasquale,” Donizetti was a prodigious worker, often producing several operas in a year. But he spent four frustrating years reworking “Lucrezia” while composing other pieces, and in 1838 he decided to change the setting and characters entirely and add new music.He called the new opera “Dalinda,” setting the action in the Middle East at the time of the Third Crusade in the 12th century, and making his title character the dominating wife and daughter of feared Muslim leaders. But Dalinda has a secret: Her illegitimate son is a Christian knight whom she longs to know. The plot revolves around their unexpected reunion when the Franks (as the Christian Crusaders are called) and the Saracens (Muslim fighters) meet to celebrate the end of a three-year war. It doesn’t turn out well.Like “Lucrezia,” the opera has the story of a mother and son at its heart, and Donizetti used “large chunks” of that music in “Dalinda,” the British-born Silver said in an interview at the University of Cape Town’s College of Music, which has produced alumni like Pretty Yende, Golda Schultz and Musa Ngqungwana. “But there is progressively more new music as it goes on, some of it really wonderful.”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

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    Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s Voice Stunned the World (and Will Again)

    “Chain of Light,” an album of four qawwalis the Pakistani singer recorded in 1990, are arriving after being discovered in the vaults of Peter Gabriel’s label.On Oct. 27, 2022, the photojournalist Saiyna Bashir was interviewing the musician Michael Brook in his Los Angeles studio when she learned something that prompted an urgent text to Zakir Thaver, her filmmaker colleague in Pakistan:“New undiscovered album.”Bashir and Thaver were producing an upcoming documentary called “Ustad” about Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan — the celebrated Pakistani singer who died in 1997 at age 48 — and Brook, the silver-haired musician whose ambient work has crossed paths with Daniel Lanois, Brian Eno and Michael Mann, had just revealed that he was working on an unreleased Khan song.It was part of “Chain of Light,” an album Brook recorded with Khan at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in England more than three decades ago. “Ya Gaus Ya Meeran,” the track in question, was an unreleased Khan qawwali, a song based on the devotional poetry of Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam.Khan, a polyglot whose musical family initially dissuaded him from singing in favor of another career, first appeared onstage as a teenager after the death of his father in 1964. Over the next two decades, his music became a balm and source of national pride for Pakistan. He began recording with Gabriel in 1988, and soon appeared on Trent Reznor’s “Natural Born Killers” soundtrack and with Eddie Vedder on the “Dead Man Walking” soundtrack. “Chain of Light” — with four traditional qawwalis written in Urdu, Punjabi and Persian that were recorded in April 1990 — will be released by Real World Records on Friday. (Khan’s daughter, Nida, along with Usha Rajan, the custodian of his estate and a family friend, have both been involved with this project.)Gabriel, who first encountered Khan when he saw him performing at the WOMAD festival, which he helped found, in 1985, recalled the moment specifically: “It was dusk and you could feel the whole arena becoming charged with the qawwali and that extraordinary, spellbinding voice,” he wrote in an email. Later working with Khan, “I was astonished at his ability to improvise wonderful melodies with all their emotional peaks and troughs,” he added. “He was not just a maestro of the voice but a master composer who could create these classic lines on the fly whilst maintaining a great sense of the whole composition, as it emerged out of the ether for the very first time.”Oran Mullan, whose job as project manager at Real World involves reintroducing the label’s material to an online audience, discovered the album’s 24-track, two-inch magnetic tapes during one of his daily scans of warehouse shelves in June 2021. Scribbled across the box was: “Trad Album,” artist: “Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.”Mullan initially thought it was one of Khan’s previously released qawwali albums. “The idea that we would find something else seemed unlikely,” he said in a phone interview from England. Mullan and Amanda Jones, the label’s manager, fast-tracked its digitization and sent it to Brook, who had released “Mustt Mustt” (1990) and “Night Song” (1996), with Khan.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

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    Jane’s Addiction to Cancel Tour After Dave Navarro and Perry Farrell Fight on Stage

    In a social media post, the rock band said it was halting its reunion tour after the group’s singer, Perry Farrell, hit its guitarist at a Boston show.The rock band Jane’s Addiction announced on Monday that it would cancel the remainder of its reunion tour in the United States and Canada days after its singer, Perry Farrell, physically confronted its guitarist at a concert in Boston.A message posted to Instagram said the band had made “the difficult decision to take some time away as a group.”Jane’s Addiction, which rose to fame in the 1980s and 1990s, was about halfway through its North America tour when the episode took place on Friday.The tour was one of several reunions convened this year by rock bands that gained cult followings in earlier decades. It was the first tour by the original band members in 14 years, according to Rolling Stone.The episode took place at the Leader Bank Pavilion in Boston. Video captured by concertgoers and verified by Storyful showed the band’s singer Farrell confronting Dave Navarro, a guitarist, as the two performed.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

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    7 People Who Helped Define the ‘Star Wars’ Galaxy

    James Earl Jones, who died last week, was one of many who made the “Star Wars” films immersive and intricate. Here is a look back at several who have died, having made a lasting impact.In 1977, a space opera movie tinged with samurai culture, cowboy attitudes and alien rivalries seemed like a mishmash doomed to fail, or at least to trickle into the annals of cinema as a cult classic.But on its release in theaters far, far and wide, “Star Wars” became an unexpected global phenomenon.It has since inspired decades of movies and television series and countless imaginary lightsaber battles in backyards around the world. The franchise became a merchandising juggernaut, and to this day remains as active as ever in sci-fi discourse.James Earl Jones, the voice of Darth Vader, died last week. He was one of many members of the “Star Wars” universe who have died, having made an indelible impact on the series.Here are the stories of some of the members of the film’s cast and crew who brought alien planets to life, perfected the beep-boop of android languages and imbued the characters with their gravitas and timeless appeal.James Earl Jones (1931 – 2024)Before he found his powerful voice, he stuttered.Even if you did not recognize James Earl Jones’s face as he shifted into different roles throughout the decades, you would surely have recognized his thunderous voice. His belonged to the embittered but resilient writer in “Field of Dreams”; the tragic commander Othello on Broadway; and, to the delight and spine-tingling terror of “Star Wars” fans, the masked arch-villain Darth Vader.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

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    Herb Alpert’s 50th Album Is Here. What’s Kept Him Going Places?

    For years, Herb Alpert talked by phone with Burt Bacharach once or twice a week. One day, two years before Bacharach’s death in 2023, he called Alpert with concerning news. “He told me he had to go to the hospital to have some fluid drained from his lungs,” Alpert said. “At the time, he was working with a musician who arranged a string part for him that he really liked. So he had the guy send him the part to bring with him to the hospital, so between shots and draining, he could study it.”“Man, he was 92 then and still studying!” Alpert exclaimed. “That’s a quality I really admire.”It’s also one he seems to share. This week, Alpert, 89, will release his 50th album, under the title “50” even though, he pointed out, he hadn’t realized he’d reached that milestone until he finished recording. His oversight shouldn’t be surprising given his schedule. Besides the new release, Alpert has been working on two other albums, in between playing dates on a tour that lasts through the end of the year. He’s also been enjoying his second career as a sculptor, having just completed a 14-foot-tall piece for the New Orleans Jazz Museum that depicts a man playing Alpert’s instrument, the trumpet.“People will look at it and say, ‘Is that you playing? Is it Miles Davis?’” Alpert said. “It’s nobody. I was just trying to capture the feeling of playing.”Communicating that feeling remains his primary concern whenever he performs or writes. “There are lots of artists who try to impress other musicians with their playing,” he said. “They’ll play these dizzying things, and you say, ‘Wow that’s fabulous!’ But is it touching anyone?”Alpert, also a sculptor, has completed a 14-foot-tall piece that depicts a man playing the trumpet.Jake Michaels for The New York TimesOver the years, Alpert’s music has touched multitudes. Since his debut album with the Tijuana Brass, “The Lonely Bull” in 1962, his sets have topped the Billboard album chart five times, generating No. 1 singles in three consecutive decades. To this day, he’s the only artist to crown the charts fronting both an instrumental track (“Rise” in 1979) and a vocal piece (“This Guy’s in Love With You,” penned by Bacharach and Hal David in 1968). In the same time frame, he and Jerry Moss co-founded and ran one of the mightiest and most respected indie labels in music history, A&M Records, which they sold in 1989 for a reported $500 million.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