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      Jermaine Jackson Is Accused of Sexual Assault in Lawsuit

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      In a complaint filed Wednesday in Los Angeles, Rita Barrett says the musician raped her at her home in 1988. Mr. Jackson has not yet responded.Jermaine Jackson, one of Michael Jackson’s older brothers and a founding member of the Jackson 5, was accused of sexual assault in a civil suit filed Wednesday in California.In the suit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, Rita Barrett accuses Mr. Jackson, 69, of sexual abuse, sexual battery, sexual assault, harassment and rape relating to an incident that she says happened at her Los Angeles home in 1988. In the court papers, Ms. Barrett says that Mr. Jackson forcefully entered her home and assaulted her, inflicting “severe emotional, physical and psychological injury, including humiliation, shame, and guilt, economic loss, economic capacity and permanent emotional distress.”The suit lists Mr. Jackson, Jermaine L. Jackson Music Productions and Work Records, a business Mr. Jackson founded, as defendants. Mr. Jackson could not be reached for comment.Ms. Barrett’s court filing says she came into contact with Mr. Jackson through her role as a musician’s contractor and as a member of a union that represents musicians. The complaint says she also knew Mr. Jackson through Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown Records, who had a personal and business relationship with Mr. Barrett’s husband. Mr. Gordy could not be reached for comment.In her suit, Ms. Barrett says that she told Mr. Gordy what happened the following day, but he “withheld and concealed the acts, further perpetuating the coverup and allowing Mr. Gordy, Defendant Jackson and others in the business relationship to continue to reap profits derived from Mr. Jackson’s work and reputation for years to come.”Ms. Barrett is requesting a jury trial.Michael Pellegrino, president of Artists Management Agency, which has represented Mr. Jackson since 2014, said the agency would be parting ways with the musician because of the suit.“We have a zero-tolerance policy concerning these matters,” Mr. Pellegrino wrote in an email to The Times on Friday. “We wish him well but we must feel comfortable about who we represent and unfortunately at this moment we must take in consideration our other clients who do not feel comfortable with the current allegations.”Jeff Anderson, a lawyer for Ms. Barrett, said that his client decided to file the suit after learning that California’s Sexual Abuse and Cover-Up Accountability Act allows certain sexual abuse claims to be revived that would otherwise be barred by the statute of limitations.“The first thing that she and we want by having brought this case is for it to be known that Jermaine Jackson committed a very serious crime,” Mr. Anderson added. More

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      Jim Ladd, Free-Form Radio Trailblazer, Is Dead at 75

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      An institution of the airwaves in Los Angeles and beyond, he capitalized on the freedom the FM band offered in the 1970s to blaze his own path.Jim Ladd, a maverick Los Angeles disc jockey who helped pioneer free-form FM radio in the 1970s, and who went on to become a rock institution and an inspiration for Tom Petty’s song “The Last DJ,” died on Dec. 17 at his home near Sacramento, Calif. He was 75.The cause was a heart attack, his wife, Helene Hodge Ladd, said.With his laid-back manner and his considerable equestrian skills, Mr. Ladd was known to longtime listeners as the Lonesome L.A. Cowboy, after a 1973 song by the New Riders of the Purple Sage. His expansive musical knowledge, saucy humor and outspoken political views made him a celebrity in rock circles — not only in Los Angeles, where he had storied runs at KLOS and KMET, but also nationally, thanks to his long-running hourlong syndicated series, “Innerview.”“Innerview,” which made its debut in 1974, featured interviews with countless rock luminaries, including the Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin and Elton John. It was heard on some 160 stations around the country.The same class of rock deity could often be found lounging around Mr. Ladd’s treehouse-like home perched on the wooded hillsides of Laurel Canyon. His house drew friends like Stevie Nicks, George Harrison and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, who featured Mr. Ladd on his second solo album, “Radio K.A.O.S.” (1987).More interested in challenging listeners with new sounds than spinning the same old chart-toppers, Mr. Ladd was well suited to the early days of free-form radio, which was made possible by a 1964 Federal Communications Commission rule preventing AM stations from repeating more than 50 percent of their formats on commonly owned FM stations in a single market.Mr. Ladd was said to be an inspiration for the Tom Petty song “The Last DJ,” an indictment of commercial radio.This allowed countless D.J.s like Mr. Ladd, on stations around the country, to shatter the Top 40 format on FM and take control of their own programming in an era when experimentation in rock was ascendant and rock itself was hailed as a force for social change.“Free-form radio was an approach to the music, and the show itself, which resulted in a highly personal and completely spontaneous new art form,” he wrote in his 1991 memoir, “Radio Waves: Life and Revolution on the FM Dial.”“Most of us never thought of it as a job,” he wrote. “A job was something ‘straight people’ did to earn ulcers. For us, it was more of a calling. We were guerrilla fighters for a generation of creative explorers, inmates who took over the asylum for just one purpose — to play with the public address system.”Mr. Ladd got his first access to this public address system in the late 1960s at KNAC in Long Beach, Calif., where he challenged listeners’ ears by playing the latest underground tunes and challenged authorities with his political passions, for example by stacking songs like “Universal Soldier” by Donovan, “The Unknown Soldier” by the Doors and “I Don’t Wanna Be a Soldier Mama I Don’t Wanna Die” by John Lennon as a musical protest against the Vietnam War.“The music at that time was filled with radical new ideas and a unique generational perspective,” Mr. Ladd wrote. “Alternative points of view not heard on the six o’clock news came through the music loud and clear. Songs about the peace movement, civil rights, Vietnam, drugs and the generation gap — and massive quantities of sex.”James William Ladd was born on Jan. 17, 1948, in Lynwood, Calif., the oldest of three children of Obie and Betty Ladd. His father was a bank loan manager who won three bronze stars as a medic in World War II; his mother was a banker.Mr. Ladd was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2005.Lucy Nicholson/ReutersHis family moved to Vacaville, Calif., near Sacramento, when he was a child. After graduating from Vacaville High School, he returned to Southern California to study at Long Beach City College before joining KNAC.Mr. Ladd spent the early 1970s at the powerhouse Los Angeles rock station KLOS before moving to a rival station, KMET, where he remained until 1987, when the station changed its format and began showcasing smooth jazz. In his book, he derided the new sound as “a computer-programmed Valium tablet, dentist-office music for yuppies.”Even as FM rock stations moved toward more rigid playlists in the 1980s, Mr. Ladd fought to maintain his independence, in both music and message, often running afoul of station management. With his outspoken ways, he was said to be an inspiration for the 2002 Tom Petty song “The Last DJ,” an indictment of commercial radio that featured lyrics like “Well, the top brass don’t like him talking so much/And he won’t play what they say to play.”In the liner notes for the album of the same name, Mr. Petty thanked Mr. Ladd for “his inspiration and courage.” “Let’s say it may have been partially inspired by me,” Mr. Ladd said in a 2015 video interview.“I don’t want to say it’s about me,” he added, “but I am very, very honored, obviously.”Mr. Ladd made stops at multiple stations over the years. In 2011 he joined SiriusXM satellite radio, where he was a host on the Deep Tracks channel. He remained there until his death.In addition to his wife, Mr. Ladd is survived by a brother, Jon, and a sister, Veronna Ladd.In a 2000 interview with The Los Angeles Times, when Mr. Ladd was back at KLOS, he broke out a handful of papers: the station’s playlist schedule, which mapped out the songs to be played over the course of the day — until his slot at 10 p.m., which remained blank. As in the old days, he could play what he chose. The only thing listeners could count on was Mr. Ladd serving up his trademark catchphrase, “Lord have mercy.”When asked why he was allowed to follow his own muse when other D.J.s at the station were not, Mr. Ladd responded, “Stubbornness, stupidity, doggedness.”The station’s program director, Rita Wilde, quoted in the article, offered a different take: “Not that many people, if you gave them the freedom, would know what to do with it.” More

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      The Beatles, Taylor Swift and More Pop Stars Mess With the Past

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      Who says hindsight is 20/20?Musicians keep getting tempted to revisit recordings they made long ago, and in 2023, flashbacks from the Beatles and Taylor Swift drew worldwide attention. Some temptations are technological; others have business imperatives. Wielding the latest digital tools, some powered by artificial intelligence, musicians and labels have been busily exploring their vaults and hard drives, many of them thoroughly convinced that they now have a better idea of how their older music is supposed to sound. Do they?Recorded music is many things: an expression, a structure, a physical performance, a series of decisions large and small, an artifact of memory and emotion, a souvenir of a particular time. But all of those aspects end up as a waveform, which can then be treated like any other information. The digital era and its computer-engineering paradigms have made that information infinitely malleable: just a starting point for version 2.0, 3.0 and beyond. A.I. is only going to make things more complicated as it reconfigures all the information available online.But with music, an update isn’t necessarily an improvement. It might be an anachronism or a betrayal instead.One of the hardest decisions for any artist is knowing when something is finished. That choice might be made after endless deliberation, on a deadline, on a whim, under the influence — who knows? In the vinyl era, that decision was usually final, give or take alternate mixes for singles, radio and clubs. Listeners reacted to, and bonded with, the music in its fixed form.Digital loosened things up — at first out of necessity, as vast analog catalogs were transferred to new formats, and then more innovatively, as musicians reveled in the possibilities of vastly expanded multitracking, sampling, editing and even glitching. Remixes, remasters, mash-ups, ghost duets — all kinds of second-guessing ensued, including among musicians themselves who were older but not necessarily wiser as artists. In the streaming era, even an official release date doesn’t make things final; Kanye West, now Ye, kept revising his 2016 LP “The Life of Pablo” — making previous iterations vanish online — well after its initial release.There are obvious commercial incentives for looking back. For many artists, as well as their marketers, it’s easier creative work to revisit sure things than to forge brand-new material. And there’s hardly a more time-tested selling point than claiming that a well-loved product is new and improved.Pop has been busily plumbing its archives since the dawn of the digital era, but 2023 brought some high-profile time-warping. The Beatles empire heralded the release of “Now and Then,” which is billed as the last song that all four members worked on, even asynchronously. It’s built from a John Lennon demo from the late 1970s that the other three Beatles started rearranging in the 1990s. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr did recording sessions to complete the track in 2022, using recent software that could cleanly separate out Lennon’s vocal.The surviving Beatles tidied up the song, strengthening the beat and jettisoning some of Lennon’s more self-doubting lyrics and lacing it with elements (like vocal harmonies) lifted from other Beatles songs. They were deliberately looking back where the Beatles of the 1960s had determinedly pushed ahead. It’s a 21st-century song, as much “now” as “then.”“Now and Then” arrived as part of the latest Beatles reissues: new, expanded, remixed versions of the anthologies known as the Red and Blue albums, “The Beatles/1962-1966” and “The Beatles/1966-1970” (now also designated “The 2023 Edition”). They are the continuation of the Beatles’ longtime efforts to wring every possible product out of their catalog: concept compilations (“Love Songs,” No. 1 hits on “1”), expanded — and illuminating — reissues that include unreleased session tapes, a “naked” mix of “Let It Be,” a megamix for Cirque du Soleil (“Love”).The Red and Blue albums, originally released in 1973, were many young listeners’ primers on the Beatles: a whirlwind career ruthlessly pared down to what two LPs could hold. The 2023 editions have more songs; they’re now three-LP sets, diluting the canon established by the original compilations. And as with the other painstakingly reworked 21st-century Beatles releases, they fidget with countless sonic details: panning instruments to different places or moving them into the center, separating parts that had been blurred or blended, bringing out new details, crisping things up.The new mixes offer a contemporary mixture of analytical clarity and arbitrary tweaks. But they don’t entirely trust that the groundbreaking 1960s Beatles already knew what they were doing in the first place — and that their artistic achievement was shaped by how the Beatles dealt with the era’s studio technology, limitations and all. People encountering the songs on streaming services may not notice which version they’re getting: the ones all the Beatles chose to release, or the new ones.A different kind of reclamation project continued when Taylor Swift released “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” her remake and expansion of her breakthrough pop album from 2014: nearly note-for-note reconstructions of the previously released songs, plus five other songs “from the vault” that she has said didn’t fit the original album. Swift has impeccable personal reasons for the do-over; she does not own the master recordings she made for the Big Machine label, even though the songs are hers. Meanwhile, her latest fans get a chance to experience a “new” Swift album as though it were being released for the first time.Yet an unimpeachable business statement is different from an artistic one. On “1989” — with the Swedish pop master Max Martin as executive producer — Swift was boldly and indelibly redefining herself. She left behind the country radio format, cranked up the beats and loops and honed her pop concision. The album has a spirit of both discipline and discovery, of kicking old expectations to the curb while flexing new skills.And that’s something the remake can’t recapture. Instead of a breakthrough, it’s more like an assignment or an exercise, diligently revisiting every instrumental layer and vocal inflection. It’s thoroughly, unblinkingly professional, but the stakes are lower. Time-warp paradoxes start with the first track, “Welcome to New York.” Swift sings, “Everybody here wanted something more/Searching for a sound they hadn’t heard before” — as she rebuilds a sound the entire world has now heard before.Of course, there’s an outlier and counterexample — as always in music — to leaving the past alone. In 2023, the Replacements released “Tim: Let It Bleed Edition,” a boxed set including a full-length remix of the band’s 1985 album “Tim” by the longtime producer and engineer Ed Stasium.“Tim” was the Replacements’ fourth album but its first on a major label, at a time when “indie credibility” seemed to matter. That identity crisis was central to the songs Paul Westerberg wrote: “God what a mess/On the ladder of success,” he sang in “Bastards of Young.”“Tim” was produced by Tom Erdelyi of the Ramones, who made it unfriendly to radio play; it’s distant, muted and unnecessarily murky, perhaps to resist any accusations that the Replacements were selling out. Stasium’s remix brings out all kinds of things that were recorded but downplayed in the original production: snappy but untamed drumming, guitars that wrangle and cackle, Westerberg’s heartfelt and rowdy vocals.Even with this mix, “Tim” probably wouldn’t have been an album-radio hit; the band was still too scrappy for mid-1980s gatekeepers. But the remixed “Tim” is the rare case where second thoughts can change things for the better. On streaming services and in the box, the Replacements don’t hide their earlier choices; the past and present versions of the album are both included. At least we can still know which is which.Digital possibilities are only going to scramble things further, untethering artistic products from their original inspirations and proportions. Oil paintings are being remarketed as environments. Albums are getting a new round of spatialized Dolby Atmos remixes. A.I. will be generating countless variations, pastiches and fakes. But amid the flood of new versions, let’s not forget to identify, recognize and celebrate the originals. More

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      A Pilgrimage to the Land of Giuseppe Verdi

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      I was 15 when I went to my first Verdi opera, “Il Trovatore,” at the Met, the old Met, in 1964. I could barely figure out what was going on but didn’t care. Leontyne Price sang Leonora, and I was in awe of her plush, beautiful voice. The singing, the chorus, the orchestra, the emotional drama, the music with its mixture of soaring melody, intensity and structure (though I couldn’t have expressed this back then) all hooked me. Two months later I was back at the Met for Verdi’s “Otello” starring, no less, Renata Tebaldi as Desdemona. I still remember the poignant warmth and uncanny bloom of her voice as she sang the sighing refrain of “salce, salce” in the “Willow Song.”I would go on to hear, and eventually review, most of the Verdi operas in productions around the world. I studied the scores in music classes and on my own at the piano. I read biographies that emphasized his deep ties to the rural region of northern Italy he came from and never really left. To me, that devotion seemed of a piece both with Verdi’s character — he was a crusty, principled man with a built-in hypocrisy detector who was suspicious of urban elites — and his respect for the heritage of Italian opera. If Wagner brought a radical agenda to remaking German opera, Verdi was a reformer who worked from within the traditions and conventions of Italian opera while subtly, steadily introducing ingenious innovations that would, over time, transform it. So I wanted to see for myself where he came from, and how his roots shaped his life and art.This fall, at long last, I made my Verdi pilgrimage, retracing his steps from his birthplace in Roncole to the crypt where he is buried in Milan. More

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      How Cancer Has Influenced Andreas Steier’s Music-Making

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      “The music stays as beautiful as it is,” said Andreas Staier, an eminent interpreter of early keyboard music who has a rare blood disease.The harpsichordist and pianist Andreas Staier has never been a morning person. And since August 2019, when he was diagnosed with primary myelofibrosis, a rare bone marrow cancer, he has felt what he called a fundamental fear most vividly in the mornings.Playing music helps. After getting out of bed, Staier goes to one of his keyboard instruments and sight-reads a piece or practices a tricky spot. “The music stays as beautiful as it is,” he said in an interview at his home in Cologne, Germany. “It doesn’t change. And that is very, very consoling.”Staier, 68, has shaped the European early music movement for 40 years. Born in Göttingen, Germany, he joined the period instrument ensemble Musica Antiqua Köln as a harpsichordist in 1983. In 1986, he left the group to concentrate on solo and chamber music, with an emphasis on the harpsichord and the fortepiano, a softer-sounding predecessor of the modern grand piano.His discography, of about 60 recordings, has remarkable range. He has uncovered forgotten gems from the Portuguese Baroque and lent startling intimacy and timbral variety to works as familiar as Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier” and Schubert’s Four Impromptus (D. 935). His 2006 album of Beethoven’s Violin Sonatas No. 4 and 7 with Daniel Pelec highlights the ferocity barely held at bay by the pieces’ Classical forms.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?  More

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      Willie Nelson, Style Icon

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      “Roll me up and smoke me when I die,” Willie Nelson sang from the stage of the Hollywood Bowl during his 90th birthday celebration in April.As usual, Mr. Nelson looked very much at ease. He was wearing a cowboy hat over a red bandanna, and his hair spilled down his back. His trusty guitar, a road-worn classical acoustic model named Trigger, hung from the red, white and blue strap around his neck. At his side was his longtime friend, the equally relaxed Snoop Dogg.The duet with Snoop was one of many high points for Mr. Nelson in 2023, when fans and colleagues expressed their appreciation for one of the great survivors of American cultural life. In February, he won the Grammy for best country album. Two months later, he was joined by Beck, Rosanne Cash, the Chicks, Gary Clark Jr., Sheryl Crow, Keith Richards and other artists for the two-night Hollywood Bowl concert.In November, shortly after his latest book, “Energy Follows Thought: The Stories Behind My Songs,” appeared in indie bookstores and Wal-Marts alike, Mr. Nelson was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. This month, CBS broadcast the Hollywood Bowl concert; and a four-part documentary retrospective, “Willie Nelson & Family,” which made its debut at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, started streaming on Paramount+.But there was a time when Mr. Nelson’s prospects seemed shaky at best, when he was just one of many Nashville strivers who was trying to follow a path mapped out by music executives who supposedly knew better.The turnaround came when he made a break from all that and decided to be fully himself, not only in his musical approach but in how he presented himself to the world.Mr. Nelson, with Sheryl Crow, performed under a portrait of his former self at the Hollywood Bowl in April, during his star-studded 90th birthday celebration.Eduardo Munoz/ReutersThe Willie Nelson who appeared on the covers of the albums he made for RCA Records in the 1960s would seem to have almost nothing in common with the “cosmic cowboy” (as he once described himself) that audiences would come to know and love.On the cover of his 1962 debut album “ … And Then I Wrote,” he is a short-haired fellow wearing a suit and an anxious grin. For his eighth studio album, “Good Times,” released in 1968, he hit a fashion low, posing in golf attire on a putting green while draping himself around a young woman in a miniskirt. The albums sold poorly, and Mr. Nelson grew more and more frustrated by his lack of agency.In addition to foisting upon this sui generis singer-songwriter the image of a generic country star, RCA insisted that he use top-flight session musicians in the recording studio, rather than the down-home band that backed him on the road. It seemed that the label was doing everything to make Mr. Nelson a star but allowing him to be himself.His transformation began in earnest after his farmhouse outside Nashville burned to the ground in 1969. As Kinky Friedman noted in the foreword to Mr. Nelson’s 2012 book, “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die,” the down-on-his-luck singer launched into his next phase by channeling the spirit of an earlier American iconoclast.“Willie told the Nashville establishment the same words Davy Crockett had told the Tennessee political establishment: ‘Y’all can go to hell — I’m going to Texas,’” Mr. Friedman wrote.Before Mr. Nelson settled on his signature look, he tried out a number of public images, including the good-time golfer on the cover of this 1968 album.In 1972 he settled in Austin, a city known for its progressive politics, laid-back vibe and mix of musical styles, from conjunto to the blues. He grew out his hair, started wearing bluejeans and T-shirts to perform at clubs like the Armadillo World Headquarters and doubled down on his switch from alcohol to pot as his preferred mood enhancer.To keep the sweat out of his eyes, he wore a red bandanna around his forehead. He grew mutton chops, then a scruffy beard. The new look fit the changing times, though it wasn’t a calculated appeal to the counterculture.“It felt good to let my hair grow,” Mr. Nelson reflected in his 2015 autobiography, “It’s a Long Story.” “Felt good to get onstage wearing the same jeans I’d been wearing all damn day. As I look at it, I was turning exactly into the person I was.”He also managed to bridge a great divide in American cultural life. As Turk Pipkin, a writer and filmmaker who has coauthored two books with Mr. Nelson, put it: “He united the hippies and the rednecks.”In 1973, he hosted the first of what would become an annual event, Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Picnic. The concert, on a ranch in the Texas Hill Country, attracted dyed-in-the-wool country music fans as well as young progressives who were discovering his music through albums like “Shotgun Willie,” released that June on his new label, Atlantic Records.Performing at Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Picnic near Austin, Texas, in 1974. Mr. Nelson wrote that it “felt good to get onstage wearing the same jeans I’d been wearing all damn day.”Bettmann, via Getty ImagesMr. Nelson’s willingness to follow his instincts was a key to his crossover success, said Peter Blackstock, who frequently covered Mr. Nelson for The Austin American-Statesman.“Cowboys like Willie because he came from a country background and was born and raised in Texas,” Mr. Blackstock said. “What was unusual is that all these people who were listening to Led Zeppelin or Frank Zappa also got interested in Willie. They appreciated the individual streak there.”Though he was considered part of the so-called outlaw country movement, Mr. Nelson couldn’t have chosen a more patriotic day to assemble his flock for a picnic; and his set list in those years, as today, included “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” “Family Bible” and other songs that reflected his upbringing in the Baptist Church.By 1978, Mr. Nelson was wearing his hair in long braids — a radical act for a male country singer. Even his fellow male “outlaws” Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and Tompall Glaser adhered to gender norms in their appearances.In 1979, he showed up at the White House waring jeans and a sating jacket to present a Country Music Association award to President Jimmy Carter. That night, Willie smoked what he called “a fat Austin torpedo” on the White House roof.Unlike his fellow country singer Charley Pride, Mr. Nelson did not wear a suit when he met with President Jimmy Carter at the Oval Office in 1979.Harvey Georges/Associated PressMuch has been made of Mr. Nelson’s appreciation of marijuana and advocacy on its behalf. A 1978 profile in High Times magazine began, “Willie Nelson smokes a lot of dope.” In the 1990s, he joined the advisory board of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML.Despite the waist-length hair and frequent pot-smoking, Mr. Nelson never abandoned his heartland roots. The High Times article quoted a friend who said he drove “a pickup truck with a gun rack”; and Mr. Nelson would go on to be a founder of Farm Aid, the annual benefit concert that has raised millions for American family farmers over the last four decades.As the nation grew more divided, his still had a knack for bringing together opposing camps. In 2015, he stood on a stage in Washington, D.C., to accept the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. Applauding him from a few feet away were Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, and Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California. In its report on the event, The Texas Tribune called Mr. Nelson “the only person who can bring Democrats and Republicans together in the nation’s capital.”Contradictions have defined his life and career. Mr. Nelson is someone who owns a home in Maui, Hawaii, with views of the Pacific Ocean, yet for several years also operated Willie’s Place, a truck stop and biodiesel processing plant in Carl’s Corner, Texas. He has taught Sunday school in Fort Worth, Texas, and praised Las Vegas for its “hustler energy.” He has had his assets seized by the I.R.S. and sung with President Obama at a 2014 benefit concert for veterans.At his 90th birthday concert in April, Mr. Nelson duetted with Snoop Dogg on the 2012 song “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die.”Joshua Timmermans/Blackbird Presents“The common thinking for almost all of us is to see things as contrary positions, and we all fall into it,” Mr. Pipkin said. “Willie doesn’t necessarily see them as contrary. He doesn’t see the billionaire and the bum in different ways.”Or, as Mr. Nelson put it in his autobiography, “I’m a man of many parts.” More

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      Zita Carno, Concert Pianist, Coltrane Scholar and More, Dies at 88

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      A veteran of 25 years with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, she was known as much for her eccentricities as for her exceptional musicianship.Zita Carno in 1960 with the composer Wallingford Riegger. The critic Harold C. Schonberg called her the “perfect interpreter” of Mr. Riegger’s technically difficult “Variations for Piano and Orchestra.”Whitestone PhotoWhen the Bronx-bred pianist Zita Carno auditioned for the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1975, she played short excerpts from the orchestra’s repertoire for the music director, Zubin Mehta.“Then Mehta said, ‘Come back tomorrow. I want to hear you play the Boulez,’” she recalled years later, referring to the French conductor and composer Pierre Boulez.“Well, I said, ‘I eat that stuff for breakfast,’ which made him laugh.”Ms. Carno was hired and spent the next 25 years as the orchestra’s pianist, capping a career as a widely praised classical keyboardist (she also played the harpsichord and organ) who was also an expert on the music of the innovative jazz saxophonist John Coltrane.Ms. Carno died on Dec. 7 in an assisted living facility in Tampa, Fla. She was 88.Her cousin Susanna Briselli said the cause was heart failure. Ms. Carno had moved to Tampa with her mother after her retirement from the Philharmonic to be near the spring training facility of the Yankees, her favorite baseball team.Ms. Carno was known as much for her eccentricities as for her musicianship.Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s music director from 1992 to 2009, said in a phone interview that Ms. Carno “had an extraordinary capacity as a musician,” adding, “She could read basically everything — not only Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms but pieces by Hindemith and Richard Strauss, with all sorts of complex transpositions, and play them in real time and in tempo.”Mr. Salonen said that Ms. Carno’s talents transcended sight-reading piano pieces and extended to calculating a full orchestral score in her head. “She had a particular kind of C.P.U. that could process a lot of information in real time,” he said. “She had that kind of unusual brain.”She also frequently used the phrase “Yoohoo, bubeleh!” — “bubeleh” is Yiddish for “sweetheart” — as a greeting in her booming voice.“Those words came out of her with startling regularity,” David Howard, a former clarinetist with the Philharmonic, said by phone. The two collaborated on an album, “Capriccio: Mid-Century Music for Clarinet,” released in 1994.During a rehearsal when Mr. Boulez was conducting the orchestra, Mr. Howard recalled, “He asked Zita to play something a little bit softer and she said, ‘Sure, bubeleh!’“Boulez was as serious and solemn a music figure as ever lived,” he added. “We had to grit our teeth to keep from laughing.”She also used the words “yoohoo” and “bubeleh” in musical scores, To Ms. Carno, “yoohoo” denoted a duplet (a group of two notes), and “bubeleh” was her word for a triplet (a group of three).Joanne Pearce Martin, Ms. Carno’s successor at the Philharmonic, wrote on Facebook after Ms. Carno’s death that she “never erased a single mark of Zita’s in any of the LA Phil keyboard parts. Seeing those ‘Bubulas’ and ‘Yoohoos’ peppered throughout the parts brings a special smile to my face — how could it not?”Ms. Carno, right, performed in an elimination round of the Leventritt Competition, a prestigious international contest for pianists and violinists, in 1959. To her left was Harriet Wingreen. Sam Falk/The New York TimesZita Carnovsky was born on April 15, 1935, in Manhattan and grew up in the Bronx. Her father, Daniel, who immigrated from Poland, was a pharmacist. Her mother, Lucia (Briselli) Carno, who was born in Odessa, Russia, was a homemaker whose piano playing Zita began to imitate when she was quite young — anywhere from 2½ to 4 years old, depending on the account.From ages 4 to 6, Zita traveled with her parents to Philadelphia, where she played duets with her uncle, Iso Briselli, a violin virtuoso, who also coached her, Ms. Briselli, his daughter, said in a phone interview. At 10, she finished writing her first fugue.She graduated from the High School of Music and Art (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts) in New York and, in 1952, received honorable mention for a piece she wrote for violin and piano in a composition contest conducted by the New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts.She attended the Manhattan School of Music, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in 1956 and her master’s the next year.When she made her debut at Town Hall in Manhattan in 1959, the New York Times critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote that she was “without a doubt one of the major young American talents, with splendid technical equipment, brains and finesse.”In October 1960, she was the soloist in a program of Romantic music during four concerts with the New York Philharmonic, with Leonard Bernstein conducting. Mr. Schoenberg called her the “perfect interpreter” of Wallingford Riegger’s technically difficult “Variations for Piano and Orchestra.”In the 1960s, she was a member of the Pro Arte Symphony Orchestra of Hofstra University and the Orchestra da Camera, both on Long Island. She was also in demand for recitals and concerts around the United States. She joined the New Jersey Symphony in the early 1970s and stayed until she left for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.She was also intrigued by jazz. (“She was always interested in cutting-edge music,” Ms. Briselli said.) In 1959, she wrote a two-part article about John Coltrane in The Jazz Review. Explaining his technique, she wrote, “Tempos don’t faze him in the least; his control enables him to handle a very slow ballad without having to resort to the double-timing so common among hard blowers, and for him, there is no such thing as too fast a tempo.”Ms. Carno, who was introduced to Coltrane by the bassist Art Davis, was able to transcribe his solos while listening to him perform.“I used to go equipped with music paper and a few well-sharpened pencils and I would take them down during the performances, which amused Trane no end,” she told Lewis Porter, the author of “John Coltrane: His Life and Legend” (1998).She wrote the liner notes to “Coltrane Jazz,” Coltrane’s second album for the Atlantic label, which was released in 1961.No immediate family members survive.In addition to her musical pursuits, Ms. Carno was an amateur baseball scholar. She wrote articles for the Society for American Baseball Research (about the pitcher Eddie Lopat) and the Baseball Research Journal (about pitchers who were notoriously tough on certain teams).She was also a science fiction fan and frequently commented online about the “Star Trek” television series and films.In a post on the science fiction author Christopher L. Bennett’s website in 2018, she said that she had been researching the Vulcan mind-meld and the half-Vulcan Mr. Spock’s advanced telepathic abilities. “As a result,” she wrote, “I have gained a whole new appreciation of the power of the mind — ‘wuh tepul t’wuh kashek’ in Vulcan — and how Spock was able to use it, especially when it came to getting himself, Captain (later Admiral) Kirk and the great starship Enterprise out of one jam after another.” More

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      Kanye West Apologizes for Antisemitic Comments With Post in Hebrew

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      “I deeply regret any pain I may have caused,” wrote the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who is releasing an album next month.Ye, the rapper and producer formerly known as Kanye West, apologized to the Jewish community on Tuesday for a series of antisemitic comments he made last year.“It was not my intention to offend or demean, and I deeply regret any pain I may have caused,” Ye said in an Instagram post that was written in Hebrew. “I am committed to starting with myself and learning from this experience to ensure greater sensitivity and understanding in the future. Your forgiveness is important to me, and I am committed to making amends and promoting unity.”Ye became embroiled in controversy in October 2022 after wearing a shirt at Paris Fashion Week that said “White Lives Matter” and posting an antisemitic tweet in which he threatened to go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” In an Instagram post, he shared a screenshot of a text exchange with the producer and music mogul Sean Combs in which he suggested that Combs was controlled by Jewish people.Many organizations, including Adidas and Creative Artists Agency, eventually cut ties with the rapper.The Anti-Defamation League said on Tuesday that Ye’s apology was welcome, while noting that actions speak louder than words.“After causing untold damage by using his vast influence and platform to poison countless minds with vicious antisemitism and hate, an apology in Hebrew may be the first step on a long journey toward making amends to the Jewish community and all those who he has hurt,” a spokesman said in an email.Ye had previously apologized for the tweet but has continued to make antisemitic comments. In one interview with the right-wing commentator Alex Jones, he said, “I love Jewish people, but I also love Nazis” and “I do love Hitler.”The rapper’s next album, “Vultures,” is set to be released on Jan. 12 after a delay. On its title track, Ye raps that he cannot be antisemitic because he had sex with a Jewish woman. More