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      The (Very Brief) Return of Gastr del Sol

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      In the ’90s, the duo of Jim O’Rourke and David Grubbs made quiet, intricate music amid a loud rock underground. A new compilation brought them back together.In late January 2016, Akinobu Oda — a Japanese restaurateur and concert promoter — taped a red-and-black handbill demanding “Don’t disturb!!!” to the window of his vegan dive in Tokyo. The reason? The American art-rock band Gastr del Sol was dining inside.It had been 18 years since the duo split. During the late 1990s, David Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke enjoyed an intense and prolific partnership, working together in multiple groups and running the audacious label Dexter’s Cigar. But they hadn’t seen each other since 2002, communicating only through sporadic emails. In Tokyo, they were finally face to face.“Our breakup was hard, because what had started as a very easy collaboration wasn’t easy anymore,” Grubbs, 56, said during a recent video interview from his Brooklyn apartment, where he was surrounded on one side by rows of records and on the other by decorative plates and vases. “I wasn’t sure how it would be, but we were there for hours after the restaurant closed.”That summit became the first move in a long path to “We Have Dozens of Titles,” a three-LP boxed set due Friday that includes the first previously unheard music from Gastr del Sol in a quarter-century. It is the end of the vault, and there will be no reunion shows or sessions.Still, with its out-of-print obscurities and several unreleased live recordings, the compilation reaffirms just how unusual the music that Grubbs and O’Rourke made during their five-year run still is. Though their music began with two carefully intertwined acoustic guitars, it stretched to encompass orchestral fantasias, electronic abstraction and collage sensibilities imported from the avant-garde. Grubbs’s image-rich writing felt poetic and detached. In an era of plangent indie rock, they were the studied, intricate eccentrics.Jim O’Rourke said he craved artistic freedom outside of Gastr del Sol: “I didn’t like my life being constrained by one thing.”Manfred RahsWe 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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      Sean Combs Apologizes After Video Shows Him Assaulting Cassie

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      After footage surfaced of Mr. Combs striking, kicking and dragging Cassie, he apologized on social media, saying that “my behavior on that video is inexcusable.”Two days after CNN published video footage showing him striking, kicking and dragging his former girlfriend, Sean Combs posted a video on social media on Sunday calling his behavior “inexcusable.”The footage that surfaced on Friday showed Mr. Combs, the hip-hop mogul known as Puff Daddy and Diddy, kicking and dragging his former girlfriend, Casandra Ventura, known as Cassie, in 2016.Last year Ms. Ventura filed and then quickly settled a lawsuit against Mr. Combs accusing him of years of physical and sexual abuse. The footage shown Friday, which appeared to come from security cameras, was consistent with some of the allegations in her lawsuit, which accused Mr. Combs of assaulting her at an InterContinental Hotel in Los Angeles in 2016 as she tried to leave.“It’s so difficult to reflect on the darkest times in your life, but sometimes you got to do that,” Mr. Combs said in his apology video, which he posted to Instagram. “I hit rock bottom — but I make no excuses. My behavior on that video is inexcusable. I take full responsibility for my actions in that video. I’m disgusted. I was disgusted then when I did it. I’m disgusted now.”A lawyer for Mr. Combs had previously denied the allegations in Ms. Ventura’s lawsuit. In a statement following the suit, which was filed in November, the lawyer said that Combs “vehemently denies these offensive and outrageous allegations.” The next day, Mr. Combs said, “We have decided to resolve this matter amicably.”In her lawsuit, Ms. Ventura accused Mr. Combs of forcing her to have sex with male prostitutes in front of him in encounters that he called “freak offs,” which she said he instructed her to arrange. Her court filing said that the 2016 assault took place after a freak off during which she said Mr. Combs “became extremely intoxicated and punched Ms. Ventura in the face, giving her a black eye.” Ms. Ventura tried to leave the hotel room after Mr. Combs fell asleep, the lawsuit said, but he awoke and began screaming, following her down the hallway and picking up glass vases and throwing them at her.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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      Review: The Tragic Story of ‘An American Soldier’ Comes Home

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      An opera about Danny Chen, an Army private who died by suicide after experiencing racist hazing while serving, was performed in New York, his hometown.Thirteen years have passed since Danny Chen, an Army private from New York, killed himself while serving in Afghanistan after experiencing brutal hazing and racist taunts from fellow soldiers. “An American Soldier,” the opera based on his story, has been seen in Washington, D.C., and St. Louis.But when the work had its run in Missouri, in 2018, Huang Ruo, its composer, and David Henry Hwang, its librettist, promised Private Chen’s family that they would try to bring it home to the city where he was born and raised. This week, they succeeded, as “An American Soldier” was produced at the Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center — just a mile or so from Chinatown, where Private Chen grew up and where a stretch of Elizabeth Street was renamed Private Danny Chen Way in 2014.In Chay Yew’s clearheaded production, with an excellent cast, the touching opera had little trouble making its impact at the performance on Saturday evening. Huang and Hwang’s piece is a straightforward Chinese American family drama, but one with obvious, shameful resonances about the treatment of Asian people and other minorities in this country, and the limits on American ideals of the embrace of difference and easy assimilation.The piece opens on the court-martial of a brutal sergeant who was Private Chen’s chief antagonist. It then alternates between the courtroom and the chronological unfolding of Private Chen’s story, from the first glimmers of his idea to join the Army — an effort to prove that he was a “real American” — through the camaraderie of basic training, his endurance of racism at his next post and his nightmarish treatment once he reaches Afghanistan. His mother is a tender presence in her scenes at home with her beloved son, and a figure of fury and hurt during the court-martial, which resulted in the sergeant’s being found not guilty of the most serious charges.The version of “An American Soldier” that premiered at Washington National Opera in 2014 was a single act of just an hour. By 2018, at Opera Theater of Saint Louis, the piece had added an act and doubled in length, delving more deeply into Private Chen’s life beyond the account of the sergeant’s trial. With some tweaks, this is the work that was performed at the Perelman Center, in a version it commissioned with Boston Lyric Opera.Whether calmly undulating under an impassioned duet or anxiously sputtering as the plot darkens, Huang’s music tends to simmer out of the spotlight, allowing the storytelling to come to the fore. But there are some idiosyncratic touches in the score, like the almost ritualistic percussion hovering under some passages and the fractured trumpet — a kind of stifled fanfare — near the end, when there is an ironic choral paean to the American motto “E pluribus unum” (“Out of many, one”).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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      Phil Wiggins, Virtuoso of the Blues Harmonica, Dies at 69

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      First as half of the duo Cephas and Wiggins and later on his own, he was one of the best-known musicians playing the style known as the Piedmont blues.Phil Wiggins, a harmonica player of such range that he could make his instrument sound like a clarinet one minute, an accordion the next and then an entire percussion section — all in the service of the complex melodies and steady rhythms of the style known as the Piedmont blues — died on May 7 at his home in Takoma Park, Md. He was 69.His daughter Martha Wiggins said the cause was cancer.For much of his career, Mr. Wiggins was best known as half of the duo Cephas and Wiggins, in which he performed and recorded with the guitarist and singer John Cephas. The two were considered one of the country’s top Piedmont blues acts, and they toured regularly at home and abroad for over 30 years, until Mr. Cephas’s death in 2009.The Piedmont blues is distinct from its Delta and Chicago cousins in its relaxed yet complicated melodies and its insistent rhythms. Its influences include gospel, Appalachian folk and early country music.Mr. Cephas played his instrument with the sophisticated fingerpicking typical of Piedmont blues. Mr. Wiggins would wrap all manner of counterpoints around it, then burst out in a solo that could be aggressive or restrained, tight or relaxed.“The harmonica works the same way as your voice,” he told Blues Blast magazine in 2021. “You have an idea in your mind that you want to express, and it just comes out, the same way speaking happens. In a lot of ways, it still feels that intuitive to me, except that, for me, the harmonica works better than my voice!”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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      The Man Who Made Roulette Into New York’s Music Lab

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      Jim Staley has led the experimental venue since it began as a concert in his TriBeCa loft. After 45 years, he’s stepping down and looking back.Saturated in sunlight on a recent afternoon, the spacious TriBeCa loft that once housed Roulette somehow feels smaller than it looms in memory. For nearly 25 years, a stellar array of established and emerging composers, improvisers, electronic producers and choreographers held court in the long, tall main room. Visitors had to pass through a kitchen: a reminder that the loft was also the home of Jim Staley, the trombonist and composer who was a founder of Roulette.Unlike many similar experimental arts venues now lost to time, Roulette has thrived and grown, now occupying a 14,000-square-foot space in Downtown Brooklyn. But Staley, 73, who still lives in the TriBeCa loft, has decided that after 45 years of leading Roulette, the time has come to step away. When this season ends in June, he will give up his role as artistic director.It’s another evolution for a vital institution that has seen many. Roulette was established in Chicago in 1978 as a way for five recent University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign graduates, including Staley, to produce their own work. But the collaborative changed course after Staley, a well-traveled Army veteran, moved to New York.Joined by two other Roulette founders, the graphic artist Laurie Szujewska and the composer David Weinstein, Staley hosted a modest five-concert series at his loft in 1980. After that, “We got a lot of proposals,” Staley said. “And we just decided, let’s do ’em all. We ended up doing about 30 concerts in the fall.”Pursuing an aesthetic guided as much by John Coltrane as by John Cage, Roulette became a crucial laboratory for the downtown-music scene, providing artists like John Zorn, Shelley Hirsch, George Lewis, Ikue Mori and many more with space, resources and recorded documentation of their work. Those artists still perform at Roulette, forming an enduring community with newer generations whose development they helped to nurture.Zeena Parkins, the estimable harpist and composer, recalled starting there as a fledgling sound engineer in 1986, soaking up all the sounds on offer.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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      How Big Is Taylor Swift?

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      You might have heard: Taylor Swift cannot be stopped. Her new album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” sold 2.6 million copies in its opening week last month, earning Swift her eighth Billboard No. 1 album since 2020. At the Grammy Awards in February, she became the first artist to win album of the year for a […] More

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      Video Shows Sean Combs Assaulting Cassie in a Hotel in 2016

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      The footage published by CNN shows Mr. Combs striking and kicking the singer when she was his girlfriend. They settled a lawsuit last year after she accused him of abuse.Hotel surveillance footage published by CNN on Friday showed Sean Combs physically assaulting and kicking Casandra Ventura, his former girlfriend, in a manner consistent with allegations she made against him in a lawsuit that she filed and settled last year.The video shows Mr. Combs, a hip-hop mogul known as Puff Daddy and Diddy, wearing a towel and confronting Ms. Ventura while she waits for an elevator. It shows him grabbing her and throwing her to the ground, kicking her twice, grabbing some of her possessions, and beginning to drag her down the hallway by her sweatshirt.Mr. Combs is also seen grabbing an object off a table and throwing it.A lawyer representing Ms. Ventura, Douglas H. Wigdor, confirmed that the woman being assaulted in the video is his client.“The gut-wrenching video has only further confirmed the disturbing and predatory behavior of Mr. Combs,” he said in a statement. “Words cannot express the courage and fortitude that Ms. Ventura has shown in coming forward to bring this to light.”A representative for Mr. Combs, who has not been criminally charged, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In Ms. Ventura’s lawsuit, she described an incident from 2016 at an InterContinental Hotel in Los Angeles in which Mr. Combs became “extremely intoxicated and punched Ms. Ventura in the face, giving her a black eye.” The lawsuit said that after Mr. Combs fell asleep, Ms. Ventura tried to leave the hotel room, but Mr. Combs woke up and followed her into the hallway.“He grabbed at her, and then took glass vases in the hallway and threw them at her, causing glass to crash around them as she ran to the elevator to escape,” the lawsuit said.Mr. Wigdor confirmed that the video footage corresponds to those allegations.Mr. Combs settled the suit with Ms. Ventura — an R&B singer known as Cassie, who had been signed to Mr. Combs’s record label — in one day in November, and denied any wrongdoing. Three suits by other women, each alleging rape, followed in quick succession, and in February a male music producer filed suit accusing Mr. Combs of unwanted sexual contact.Mr. Combs is facing a federal investigation, which officials said was at least in part a human trafficking inquiry. In March, federal agents raided his homes in Los Angeles and Miami Beach, Fla., and stopped him at a Miami-area airport, confiscating his electronic devices. Mr. Combs has vehemently denied the accusations in the civil suits, calling them “sickening allegations” from people looking for “a quick payday.” His lawyers have sharply criticized how the raids — which involved agents from Homeland Security Investigations brandishing guns — were carried out, calling them a “gross overuse of military-level force.” More

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      The Ragged Glory of Neil Young and Crazy Horse Live

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      Hear 11 songs from an electrifying New York set this week.Neil Young, seen here onstage in 2019, brought Crazy Horse to Forest Hills Stadium in Queens this week.Amy Harris/Invision, via Associated PressDear listeners,On Tuesday night, at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, I checked a major box on my musical bucket list: I got to see Neil Young live for the first time. And not just Young, but also Crazy Horse, his longtime, magnificently shambolic backing band who more or less helped invent both grunge and the modern jam band. Young’s first New York concert in over a decade was a magical, rain-dappled night, and I have tried to preserve the memory by creating a playlist of highlights from the set.There has always been something outside-of-time about the ironically named Young, a man who has in some sense sung and written like an old man since he was a teenager. (I mean that in the most affectionate way possible.) Perhaps for that reason, it is less jarring to see him onstage at age 78 than it is some other rock legends, and it helps that he has preserved that distinct, one-of-a-kind vocal tone along with his dexterity as a guitarist. The crowd was noticeably intergenerational, like the band onstage: Replacing Crazy Horse’s now-retired rhythm guitarist Poncho Sampedro was Willie Nelson’s 33-year-old son, Micah, who beautifully and steadily supported Young’s incandescent soloing.Fitting for a band that embraces improvisational spontaneity, Tuesday night’s stop on the Love Earth tour was actually more memorable for its technical difficulties and the way Young handled them. The trouble began at the end of a three-song stretch where Young played solo, accompanied by just his acoustic guitar and harmonica. During a rousing rendition of the 1978 ballad “Human Highway,” a P.A. seemed to blow out, cutting off Young’s amplification entirely. His vocal mic was still wonky when a tech handed him an electric guitar, so he proceeded to do one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen a 78-year-old do at a rock concert: raise his guitar to his mouth and communicate with the crowd through its pickup. “We’d like to thank everyone for being here tonight,” he said in a muffled warble. Rock ’n’ roll can never die, indeed.Relive Tuesday night’s show along with me — and celebrate Young’s recent return to Spotify — by listening to this playlist, culled entirely from songs played that night. I’ve mixed in some live tracks along with album versions, to better capture the ragged glory of Neil and the Horse. Come down from the misty mountain and press play.Shelter me from the powder and the finger,LindsayListen along while you read.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