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      Dave ‘Baby’ Cortez, Hitmaker Who Seemed to Vanish, Is Dead at 83

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      His “The Happy Organ” reached No. 1 in 1959, but his pop stardom was short-lived, and his death in 2022, with an anonymous burial, remains a source of mystery.It’s not that Dave “Baby” Cortez was forgotten. A keyboardist, singer and songwriter, he emerged from the thriving Detroit doo-wop scene of the 1950s to score two Top 10 hits, one of which, “The Happy Organ,” an aural Tilt-a-Whirl of an instrumental, soared to No. 1 in March 1959 and sold more than a million copies.But he rarely granted interviews, particularly after largely abandoning the business, with a trace of bitterness, in the early 1970s. The few available online biographies provide almost no details of his life beyond his recording history and chart success.Taryn Sheffield, his daughter, said in an interview that she had not heard from him since 2009. “He’s been a recluse for many, many years,” she said.At times, he appeared to serve as a church organist in Cincinnati, said Miriam Linna, a founder of Norton Records, an independent New York label that in 2011 persuaded Mr. Cortez to record his first album since 1972. At other times, he appeared to be living in the Bronx, doing who knows what.It was only in recent weeks that Ms. Linna learned that he had been dead for three years.According to city records, Mr. Cortez — whose real name was David Cortez Clowney — died on May 31, 2022, at his home on Westchester Avenue in the Bronx. He was 83. His body lies in Plot 434 on Hart Island, the potter’s field off the coast of the Bronx, where some one million bodies are buried in unmarked graves.It was an ignominious end for an artist whose career was curious enough to begin with.Mr. Cortez was born on Aug. 13, 1938, in Detroit, one of two sons of David and Lillian Mae Clowney. His father played piano and encouraged David to follow suit.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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      Does Lorde Still Want to Be a Star?

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeLorde’s fourth album, “Virgin,” recently debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard album chart, a reflection of the fan enthusiasm she’s held tight to for the decade-plus since she shook up pop’s insider-outsider balance with her breakthrough single, “Royals.”But on this album — and really, each album since her debut — she’s implicitly pondered whether being famous is all it’s cracked up to be, in terms of what the musical and personal expectations are. “Virgin” is maybe the most musically scattered of her albums, but in moments, she accesses an emotional directness that manages to turn this sometimes confused music into something direct and appealing.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about how “Virgin” figures into the Lorde lore; whether making hits is a worthwhile endeavor; and whether knowing the circumstances of an album’s creation can enhance someone’s listening experience of it.Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterHazel Cills, an editor at NPR MusicConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica.Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. More

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      In Des Moines, Big Operas and Big Ambitions Fill a Tiny Theater

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      Richard Wagner may be the opera composer most associated with epic grandeur: huge orchestras, huger sets. I never imagined I’d hear a full performance of one of his works while sitting just a few feet from the singers.But Des Moines Metro Opera, a four-week summer festival founded in 1973 and running this year through July 20, has made a specialty of squeezing pieces usually done in front of thousands into a startlingly intimate space. The company’s 476-seat theater wraps the stage around the pit and juts deep into the audience, drawing even the last row into the action.At the opening of Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman” in the last week of June, the bass-baritone Ryan McKinny could brood in a murmur as the endlessly wandering captain of the title, while the choruses of raucous sailors were ear-shakingly visceral. It registered when the subtlest Mona Lisa smile crossed the face of Julie Adams as Senta, whose romantic obsession leads her to sacrifice everything for the Dutchman. Try that at the Met.Miye Bishop as the Dragonfly in “The Cunning Little Vixen,” with high-definition LED video by the designer and filmmaker Oyoram.Kathryn Gamble for The New York Times“When you first get here, it’s a little intimidating,” said the mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce, a Des Moines regular in recent years. “There’s no hiding, or even trying to. Everything is in hyper detail. Everything is in close-up.”The effect would be striking enough in Mozart or chamber opera. But the company has made a habit of putting on big, challenging works of a sort rarely if ever done in theaters so small: “Salome,” “Elektra,” “Pelléas et Mélisande,” “Billy Budd,” “Peter Grimes” and “Wozzeck,” with modest adjustments to some orchestrations, given a pit that fits about 65 musicians.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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      Henry Mount Charles, Whose Castle Was a Mecca for Rock, Dies at 74

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      To preserve his Irish manor, he staged concerts on its grounds, drawing the likes of U2, Bob Dylan, Madonna and the Rolling Stones as well as tens of thousands of fans.In 1976, Henry Mount Charles was 25 and living happily in London when his father summoned him home to Ireland to save the family castle from bankruptcy.Taking over the property, Slane Castle, with its vast expenses and minimal income, Lord Mount Charles first opened a restaurant there, the ancestral home of his aristocratic family. Then he contemplated the possibilities of the front lawn: a natural amphitheater sloping down to the Boyne River.He hit on the idea of open-air rock concerts. The first, in 1981, featured a young Irish band named U2. The next year, the Rolling Stones played for 70,000 ecstatic fans, and Mick Jagger stayed for dinner.Slane Castle in County Meath, north of Dublin.Julien Behal/PA Images, via Getty ImagesSlane Castle went through a decade-long restoration after a devastating fire in 1991.Nomos Productions, via Failte IrelandSlane Castle, some 35 miles north of Dublin, in County Meath, became internationally known as a rock destination. Bruce Springsteen, Guns N’ Roses, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Queen, Madonna, Foo Fighters, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bryan Adams, Eminem, 50 Cent, R.E.M. and Oasis all performed there, while V.I.P. concertgoers wandered in an out of the owner’s 18th-century hilltop Georgian pile, resembling Downton Abbey.Lord Mount Charles, an Anglo-Irish peer turned rock ’n’ roll promoter, died on June 18 in a hospital in Dublin at 74. His family said the cause was cancer.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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      Gilberto Gil Steps Away From the Stage, Vowing ‘My Music Will Continue’

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      At 83, the lauded Brazilian singer and songwriter whose career in music and politics has encompassed six decades is on a farewell tour.Gilberto Gil had been living in exile for a month when he first saw Bob Dylan take the stage.That was in August 1969, when Gil, who is now a revered international figure with a 60-year career behind him, had just turned 27. The military dictatorship in Brazil had “invited” him to leave the country after an arrest on charges of “inciting youth to rebel” during a show in Rio de Janeiro, among other accusations. Forced to flee, Gil chose London — a meeting point for musician and artist expats, with its vibrant cultural scene and artistic freedom — as his new home.He arrived just in time for the Isle of Wight Festival and knew he couldn’t miss his chance to see Dylan play his first show since a motorcycle accident had nearly taken his life.“It’s that passivity, almost,” Gil said in a recent interview. “That calmness he has onstage, without many exuberant gestures. That’s what I wanted to soak up and apply to my own performance.”And through the years, whether his image was as an inciter of youth or an insightful philosopher, he did. Even as Gil stood onstage in São Paulo this April on his farewell tour, it was the eloquence of his words and the memories his music evoked that captivated 40,000 fans.A chorus of voices accompanied Gil as he guided concertgoers through the many genres of his career — samba, baião, jazz, reggae, rock and international pop, among them. An innovator with a knack for preserving his country’s classic styles while building on them, Gil has used both his music and his voice to help fellow Brazilians feel pride in where they come from and hope in where they’re going. In addition to releasing dozens of albums, he has worked in politics since 1987 and served as Brazil’s Minister of Culture from 2003 to 2008.Gil, now 83, admits that it’s time to slow down. He doesn’t shy away from talk about aging: It’s just another change in a life of metamorphosis. And the name he gave his final stadium tour — Tempo Rei (which translates to Time Is King), borrowed from his 1984 song about the passage of time, the brevity of life and the necessity of transformation — alludes to just that.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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      Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Will Be Sentenced in October

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      The music mogul was convicted last week on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution, each carrying a maximum of 10 years in prison.Sean Combs will be sentenced on Oct. 3, a federal judge decided on Tuesday.Last week, a jury found Mr. Combs guilty on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution, charges that were related to hiring and arranging travel for male escorts to have sex with his girlfriends in voyeuristic encounters known as “freak-offs” and “hotel nights.” The music mogul was acquitted on the most serious counts, sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy, after an eight-week trial.Mr. Combs faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, but it is unusual for federal judges to assign the maximum punishment. The time that Mr. Combs will have already served in jail, which will be one year at the time of sentencing, would be credited to the ultimate sentence.Prosecutors have said that based on their preliminary calculations, federal sentencing guidelines indicate a range of at least 51 to 63 months’ imprisonment, or four and a quarter to five and a quarter years. But the government could ask for more time. Sentencing guidelines are used to create a penalty range based on various factors, including the nature of the offense, specifics of the case and personal characteristics of the defendant, such as the person’s criminal history.Using the same guidelines, Mr. Combs’s defense team calculated a very different range: between 21 and 27 months, with the top of that range being just over two years.After the verdict last week, Judge Arun Subramanian, who oversaw the trial, denied Mr. Combs’s request for release on bail, citing the defense’s own admissions that its client had been responsible for domestic violence.Judge Subramanian scheduled the sentencing after the defense and the government were supposed to debate the logistics at an afternoon hearing. But the two sides came to an agreement on the date beforehand.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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      Listening Back to When Janet Jackson Was for Lovers

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      Hear six sensual songs by the pop great.Ms. Jackson if you’re nasty.Bonnie Schiffman/Getty ImagesDear listeners,As the senior staff editor for the Arts & Leisure section, I’m often lost in a big profile. The kind that makes you consider the arc of a career, its slopes, its peaks, and its inevitable chasms. And because so much of my life has been organized around music — I was 6 when I first bounced into the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music for voice and theory instruction — the contours of a pop life have always been particularly fascinating to me.There’s a Janet Jackson video that I’ve been thinking about a lot, one that captures her at a moment of metamorphosis. It opens on a warmly lit loft, where Jackson’s dancers, playing themselves, are playfully trying to coax her into handing over the cassette (it’s 1993!) that houses the lead single from her new album. After a false start, it begins. “That’s the Way Love Goes” sounds like sweaty bodies and basement parties, a song in the key of pleasure seeking. It was considered a sonic departure for an artist who, just shy of 27, had prized discipline, control.For the vérité-style video, directed by her partner at the time, René Elizondo Jr., Jackson re-emerged beaming: her skin coppertone, hair a cascade of crinkly waves (not a military cap in sight) — and emitting what I understand now as the aura of a woman who’s given herself permission. In an interview that year with The Los Angeles Times, she described her approach to making the album, titled simply, “Janet.”: “I finally just started writing down all my feelings about love,” she said, “making love, falling in love, falling out of love, everything.”And with that, she ushered in what I can only call the Pleasure Era. Here, my favorites — with a few flirtations from other moments in her catalog.It’s always a summer of love,RebeccaListen 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

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      Aix Festival: How to Experience It From Afar

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      Many of the offerings at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France are broadcast, or they travel to other theaters. Here are some highlights.Every summer, opera moves from the city to the country. Stars pack their bags for idyllic destinations, and their most dedicated, deep-pocketed fans follow.It’s festival season, and perhaps the most interesting one is in Aix-en-Provence, France. At the Aix Festival, directors take risks on classics, and new works are unveiled in spots as old-fashioned as a Baroque theater and as unlikely as a monolithic stadium off the highway. Audience members come from around the world, often laid back in linens and sandals, expecting an operatic adventure worth traveling for.This year’s Aix Festival, which continues through July 21, has been somberly tinted by the death of its general director, Pierre Audi, in early May. He had commissioned two productions that premiered during the opening weekend: an intimate, charged reimagining of Britten’s “Billy Budd” by the director Ted Huffman and the composer Oliver Leith; and the world premiere of “The Nine Jewelled Deer,” a long but frequently beautiful collaboration among the composer Sivan Eldar, the director Peter Sellars, the artist Julie Mehretu and the author Lauren Groff.It’s too soon to know whether those shows will travel and take root. But other festival productions already have plans to be broadcast and streamed online, or even to be revived at other opera houses. Below are ways to experience them for yourself. (Some media may be restricted in certain countries.)‘Don Giovanni’Andrè Schuen, above, and Clive Bayley in “Don Giovanni” at the Grand Théâtre de Provence.Monika RittershausThe festival opened on July 4 with a new production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” directed by Robert Icke in his opera debut and conducted by Simon Rattle, leading the lush Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. Icke is known for his intelligent, liberal adaptations of theater classics, and he was similarly bold, if sometimes overflowing with ideas, in taking on one of the most difficult operas in the canon.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