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      Britney Spears Judge Denies Motion to Expedite Hearing About Her Father

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      A judge overseeing the singer’s case ruled that a court date to address removing or suspending James P. Spears as conservator would remain scheduled for September.A judge overseeing the conservatorship of Britney Spears has denied a request to expedite a forthcoming hearing that will focus on whether to remove or suspend the singer’s father from a role in directing the legal arrangement, as a new lawyer for Ms. Spears recently petitioned.The ruling by Judge Brenda Penny on Monday in Los Angeles probate court denied the request made last week by Mathew S. Rosengart, a former federal prosecutor who was approved in July to replace the court-appointed lawyer who began representing Ms. Spears in 2008.Mr. Rosengart had called for moving up a Sept. 29 hearing in the case as he seeks to have the singer’s father, James P. Spears, removed as conservator of her estate, a position Mr. Spears has held, sometimes in collaboration with others, for 13 years. Ms. Spears has called the arrangement abusive and exploitative, singling out her father’s control over the conservatorship.“Every day that passes is another day of avoidable harm and prejudice to Ms. Spears and the Estate,” her lawyer wrote last week, in calling for Mr. Spears’s immediate suspension or a quicker hearing date.Mr. Rosengart’s request to remove Mr. Spears as conservator of the estate has been supported by Ms. Spears’s medical team, her mother and her current personal conservator, Jodi Montgomery, who say it is in the singer’s best interest, according to court papers.A lawyer for Mr. Spears, Vivian Lee Thoreen, agreed in a court document filed on Friday to moving the hearing date to as early as Aug. 23. But she opposed the idea that Mr. Spears needed to be quickly removed from his position overseeing her estate, writing that Mr. Spears “dutifully and faithfully served as the conservator of his daughter’s estate without any blemishes on his record.”Judge Penny’s order on Monday denying Mr. Rosengart’s request did not provide a reason, according to the court document filed, but the application was denied without prejudice, meaning it could be filed again with additional evidence.Mr. Rosengart did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday. Lawyers for Mr. Spears declined to comment.Ms. Spears, 39, has lived under a court-approved conservatorship that closely supervises her life and finances since 2008, when concerns over her mental health and potential substance abuse led the singer’s father to apply for control over her decisions.But after years of chafing at the life strictures behind the scenes — while continuing to work lucratively as a headlining pop star — Ms. Spears has moved aggressively to alter or end the arrangement since she testified publicly in June, calling for an investigation into her conservators and the ability to hire her own lawyer.While the singer has said she wishes for the arrangement to be ended outright, Mr. Rosengart, while leaving that option open, has so far pursued what he called “the most pressing issue facing Ms. Spears: removing Mr. Spears as conservator of the estate.”Liz Day contributed reporting. More

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      Robert Carsen Is Opera’s Most Reliably Excellent Director

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      If you’re an opera fan, chances are you’ve seen one of his productions. The latest, a Handel oratorio, is running at the Salzburg Festival.SALZBURG, Austria — “I personally don’t like the word ‘reliable,’” Robert Carsen said in an interview here recently. “It sounds so boring.”I had approached Carsen with a theory: that he might be the most, well, reliable director in opera. I meant it as high praise: His work is by no means repetitive, cautious or dull. But in more than 125 productions over three decades in the field, he has been peerlessly dependable.You can expect Carsen productions to be sophisticated, intelligently conceived and conceptually airtight. They connect with newcomers, while also leaving room for mystery and provocation. They are elegantly designed, even strikingly beautiful, yet not superficial. And always — reliably, you could say — their confidence reflects Carsen’s mastery of the material at hand.All this is evident in his staging of Handel’s oratorio “Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno,” which is running at the Salzburg Festival through Aug. 17. But it also can be clearly seen in the 10 more of his productions that I revisited on video this summer.If you’re an opera fan, chances are you’ve seen at least one of them. Carsen’s career has been varied — also including theater, exhibition design and fashion — but about 75 percent of it, he estimated, has been in opera. Carsen, 67, who was born in Canada but trained as an actor in London and made a home there until Brexit prompted him to move to Portugal, had his breakthrough in 1988 with a staging of the Boito rarity “Mefistofele,” an unwieldy and ironic take on “Faust,” for the Geneva Opera.It was no modest entrance: Carsen greeted the piece’s messiness with a spectacle of smoothly shifting registers of sincerity and sarcasm. The production traveled far beyond Geneva, and was revived by the Metropolitan Opera as recently as 2018.Christian Van Horn, center, in the title role of “Mefistofele,” revived at the Metropolitan Opera in 2018 after Carsen first staged it in 1988.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSince “Mefistofele,” Carsen said, he has never had a real plan for his career, but he has always been attracted to opera for its basic ingredients: concrete text and abstract music. “When the two come in harmony, you get this amazing experience,” he said. “Your head and your heart are engaged, satisfied and in dialogue with each other.”Carsen has his preferences. Of Rossini, he said, “I have no emotional response”; his favorites are Janacek and Handel, “because they’re so honest.” And for 25 years he has wanted to stage Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress.”If Carsen did take on that piece, he would likely start with Auden’s libretto. Because of his training as an actor, he studies text obsessively, which explains the thoroughness of his concepts.“If the thing doesn’t work all the way through, you have to throw it out,” he said. “A thing has to work from beginning to end for me to be satisfied, and sometimes it’s only in the end that people realize why you made a certain choice.”At opera’s best, Carsen says, “your head and your heart are engaged, satisfied and in dialogue with each other.”Oscar Gonzalez/NurPhoto, via Getty ImagesIn a “Tannhäuser” he staged in Barcelona, for example, he transported Wagner’s tale of a singing knight to the studio of a contemporary painter. Rather than succumbing to a struggle between the sacred and profane, the artist reconciles them into a new kind of art that is initially rejected, but in the opera’s final moments joins a gallery of masterpieces that were misunderstood in their own time.It’s a bittersweet ending, one that may not seem to follow the libretto. But it makes sense: Tannhäuser’s redemption is ultimately out of his hands, whether in medieval Germany or the pantheon of Western art.At times, Carsen has found that a libretto speaks well enough for itself, as in his minimalist production of Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” at the Met, first seen in 1997 (and available on demand in a film from 2007). It is an arrestingly spare actors’ playground, surrounded by towering white walls, the stage covered in autumnal fallen leaves. Late in the opera, Carsen breaks from tradition, ending Act II before Onegin’s fatal duel with his best friend.Renée Fleming in Carsen’s “Eugene Onegin” at the Metropolitan Opera.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOnce that moment finally arrives, after intermission, it leads directly into the joyous polonaise that opens the third act, now shatteringly ironic: Onegin doesn’t miss a beat after killing his friend, remaining in place as his servants spritz him with perfume and dress him for a ball. It is echt Carsen: loyal to, yet building on, the opera.The Tatyana in that “Onegin” was Renée Fleming, who reunited with Carsen for Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” at the Royal Opera in London, a staging that came to the Met in 2017. This may be the quintessential Carsen production: gorgeous, sensual and smartly considered, with an affecting coup de théâtre at the close.He moved the opera’s action to the time and place of its premiere: Vienna on the brink of World War I. He was inspired by Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s small but telling changes to the libretto, which made the Marschallin the wife of an army leader and Faninal a nouveau riche arms dealer. There are other touches drawn from throwaway moments in the text; Carsen has the Marschallin exit the opera arm-in-arm with another young soldier, based on a story she begins to tell her lover, Octavian, in Act I before abruptly changing the subject. The opera may be about one affair, but it is neither her first nor last.Carsen’s “Der Rosenkavalier,” which moved the opera’s action to the time of its premiere.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe production was unexpectedly resonant when it arrived at the Met, in the early months of the Trump presidency, when the country felt, after the abrupt end of the Obama era, on the edge of an uncertain future. The early scenes reflect the unsustainable excess of prewar life; the walls of the Marschallin’s bedroom seem barely able to hold the weight of all the portraits, the history, of her family. And the set literally bursts open in the opera’s final measures, revealing the haze of cannon fire and soldiers on the front — a rude awakening from the dream of the opera’s romance.For “Il Trionfo” in Salzburg, things may appear more contemporary: The character Bellezza (Beauty) is presented as the winner of “The World’s Next Top Model,” and is then wooed into a life of celebrity by one of the judges, Piacere (Pleasure) — while the other two, Tempo (Time) and Disinganno (Insight), engage in something of a battle for her soul. But as it goes on, the production becomes increasingly abstract.The first half is a parade of glamorously hedonistic tableaux, whose use of video — unusual in a Carsen production — is more of a dramatic device than a gimmick. At one point the videos are invasively focused on Bellezza, who is subjected to the relentless scrutiny of fame despite its visible toll on her mental health; you could imagine her as Britney Spears or Naomi Osaka.But as Tempo and Disinganno raise the curtain on the theater of truth, as they say in the second half, the stage becomes shallow, filled with a mirror that eventually gives way to the absence of any set: just an exposed backstage whose rear door Bellezza opens, exiting to the street. At the end of this oratorio there is no longer theater — only reality.It’s a powerful closing image for a work that wasn’t even originally meant to be staged. Yet Carsen fashions it into sustained drama, with the excellence that he can be, yes, relied upon to deliver. More

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      Billie Eilish, 21st-Century Pop Paragon, Hits No. 1 With Big Vinyl Sales

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      “Happier Than Ever” debuted at the top of the Billboard 200 with 54 percent of its total from physical formats.Billie Eilish emerged a few years ago as the embodiment of the new-model pop star — flooding the internet with content, designing merch items herself and accumulating boatloads of fans through social media.But in some ways her mode of success is thoroughly traditional. “Happier Than Ever,” the seven-time Grammy winner’s second studio album, opens at No. 1 on the latest Billboard album chart with decent streaming traffic but extraordinary sales of vinyl, CDs and even cassettes. It had 114 million streams — far exceeded by other recent chart-toppers by J. Cole, Olivia Rodrigo and Morgan Wallen, among others — but sold 153,000 copies as a complete package.Altogether, “Happier Than Ever,” Eilish’s second No. 1 album, had the equivalent of 238,000 sales in the United States, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm. It was the fifth-best opening for an album this year — beaten by Cole, Rodrigo, Wallen and Taylor Swift.Released in an array of boxed sets and retail-exclusive variants, “Happier Than Ever” made 54 percent of its total sales in the United States on physical formats, including 73,000 vinyl LPs, 46,000 CDs and nearly 10,000 on cassette. It had the second-highest weekly vinyl haul since at least 1991, when SoundScan, MRC Data’s predecessor, first began keeping accurate data on music sales. (Only Swift’s recent LP release of “Evermore,” which sold 102,000 copies after months of preorders, had more.)How unusual is that? Well, last year streaming made up 83 percent of recorded music revenues in the United States, and physical formats just 9 percent, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. But CD and LP sales are far more lucrative than streams, and offer a big chart boost. Indeed, “Happier Than Ever” would have taken No. 1 this week on vinyl sales alone.Also this week, “Welcome 2 America,” an unearthed Prince album recorded in 2010, opens at No. 4, with the equivalent of 54,000 sales. The Kid Laroi’s “____ Love,” last week’s top seller, falls to No. 2, Rodrigo’s “Sour” is No. 3 and Doja Cat’s “Planet Her” is in fifth place. More

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      Billie Eilish’s New Pop Perspective

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      When Billie Eilish swept the biggest Grammy categories in early 2020, she was a phenomenon, yet somehow not quite a pop star. Her music tended toward the gloomy and insular, and her ravenous fan base was built online among young people, not on the radio.One pandemic later, and Eilish’s world — and worldview — has grown. Her new No. 1 album, “Happier Than Ever,” addresses her fame, and its wages, head on, with her most emotionally specific lyrics. It is an album made by someone freshly cast out of the womb.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Eilish’s musical and personal evolutions, how she has navigated growing up in public and the harsh sensation of the internet beginning to turn on one of its own.Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterLindsay Zoladz, who writes about music for The New York Times and others More

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      Jacob Desvarieux, Guitarist Who Forged Zouk Style, Dies at 65

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      His band, Kassav’, found millions of listeners as it held on to Caribbean roots while reaching out to the world. He died of Covid-19.This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.Jacob Desvarieux, the guitarist and singer who led Kassav’, an internationally popular band from the French Antilles, died on July 30 in a hospital in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, the island where he lived. He was 65.The cause was Covid 19, Agence France-Presse reported.Mr. Desvarieux and the founder of Kassav’, the bassist Pierre-Edouard Décimus, created a style called zouk by fusing Afro-Caribbean traditions of the French Antilles with sleek electronic dance music.Kassav’ made nearly two dozen official studio albums, and the band recorded an additional two dozen studio albums credited to individual members, along with extensive live recordings.Kassav’ toured worldwide and sold in the millions, particularly in France and in French-speaking Caribbean and African countries. Mr. Desvarieux shaped a vast majority of the band’s songs as guitarist, songwriter, arranger or producer, and his amiably gruff voice often shared the band’s lead vocals, with lyrics in French Antillean Creole. Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, paid tribute on Twitter: “Sacred zouk monster. Outstanding guitarist. Emblematic voice of the Antilles. Jacob Desvarieux was all of these at the same time.” Kassav’ made suave, irresistibly upbeat music with a carnival spirit, and purposefully stayed connected to its Afro-Caribbean roots. Its albums mingled love songs and party songs with sociopolitical commentary, sometimes couched in double entendres. The core of the zouk beat drew on gwo ka, from Guadeloupe, and chouval bwa, from Martinique: two traditions rooted in the drumming of enslaved Africans.“Through our music, we question our origins,” Mr. Desvarieux said in a 2016 interview with the French newspaper Libération. “What were we doing there, we who were Black and spoke French? Like African Americans in the United States, we were looking for answers to pick up the thread of a story that had been confiscated from us.”He added, “Without being politicians or activists, Kassav’ carried it all. From our faces to the themes in our songs, everything was very clear: We were West Indian, there should be no mistake, we wanted to mark our difference.”Jacob F. Desvarieux was born in Paris on Nov. 21, 1955, but he soon moved to Guadeloupe, where his mother, Cécile Desvarieux, was born; she raised him as a single parent and did domestic work. They lived in Guadeloupe and Martinique, in Paris and, for two years, in Senegal.When Jacob was 10, he asked his mother for a bicycle; she gave him a guitar instead, considering it less dangerous.After returning to France, he joined rock bands in the 1970s, playing songs from Chuck Berry and Jimi Hendrix, and worked as a studio guitarist. His own music increasingly looked to Caribbean and African styles, including compas from Haiti, Congolese soukous from what was then Zaire, rumba from Cuba, highlife from Ghana and makossa from Cameroon.One of his bands in the 1970s, Zulu Gang, included musicians from Cameroon; Mr. Desvarieux also worked with the Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango, who had the international hit “Soul Makossa.”In 1979 in Paris, Mr. Desvarieux met Pierre-Édouard Décimus, a musician from Guadeloupe with an ambitious concept for a new band: strongly rooted in the West Indies but reaching outward. “We were looking to find a soundtrack that synthesized all the traditions and previous sounds, but that could be exported everywhere,” Mr. Desvarieux told Libération.Kassav’ was named after a Gaudeloupean dish, a cassava-flour pancake, and also after ka, a drum. A zouk was a dance party, and a 1984 hit by Mr. Desvarieux, “Zouk-La-Se Sel Medikaman Nou Ni” (“Zouk Is the Only Medicine We Have”), made the word zouk synonymous with the band’s style.Mr. Desvarieux, left, performing in Abidjan in the Ivory Coast in 2009. Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, said of him on Twitter: “Sacred zouk monster. Outstanding guitarist. Emblematic voice of the Antilles.” Sia Kambou/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesKassav’ released its debut album, “Love and Ka Dance,” in 1979. “It was successful because it was Antillean music — it was local,” Mr. Desvarieux told Reggae & African Beat magazine in 1986. “But it was also better made than other Antillean discs. The instruments and vocals were in tune, and there were more sounds, like synthesizers and things like that — all the things that were not heard in Antillean records.”As the band pumped out new music, its early influences from disco and rock receded; Kassav’ simultaneously brought out its Caribbean essence and mastered programming and electronic sounds.It had a commercial breakthrough in 1983, with “Banzawa,” a single from what was nominally a solo album by Mr. Desvarieux and was later repackaged as a Kassav’ album. The 1984 album “Yélélé,” which was billed as a project by Mr. Desvarieux and Georges Décimus (Pierre-Edouard’s brother) and later credited to Kassav’, included the single “Zouk-La-Se Sel Medikaman Nou Ni.” With 100,000 copies sold, it was the first gold record for an Antillean band, and it led to Kassav’ being signed to Sony Music and distributed internationally. By the end of the 1980s, the sound of zouk was influencing dance music worldwide.In 1988, Kassav’ was named Group of the Year by Victoires de la Musique, an award presented by French Ministry of Culture.Zouk’s popularity peaked as the 1980s ended, but Kassav’ continued to draw huge audiences. From the 1980s onward, Kassav’ regularly played long residences at the 8,000-seat arena Le Zenith, where it recorded live albums in 1986, 1993, 1996, 2005 and 2016; Mr. Desvarieux estimated that the band performed there 60 times.For the band’s 30th anniversary, in 2009, Kassav’ played at France’s national stadium, Stade de France, and in 2019, it sold out its 40th anniversary concert at the 40,000-seat Paris La Défense Arena.Kassav’ also toured across continents and built a huge, loyal audience, particularly in Africa, where it has drawn stadium-sized crowds since the 1980s. The Senegalese songwriter Youssou N’Dour wrote on Twitter, “The West Indies, Africa and music have just lost one of their greatest Ambassadors.” In Luanda, the capital of Angola, there is a museum of zouk, La Maison du Zouk, that has a collection of 10,000 albums. Mr. Desvarieux and Pierre-Édouard Décimus attended its opening in 2012.Mr. Desvarieux was also occasionally cast for film and television. In 2016, he appeared as an African cardinal in the HBO series “The Young Pope.”Mr. Desvarieux welcomed collaborations with musicians from Africa and the Caribbean. He appeared on Wyclef Jean’s 1997 album “The Carnival” and recorded songs with the Ivory Coast reggae singer Alpha Blondy and with Toofan, a group from Togo.“Laisse Parler les Gens” (“Let the People Talk),” a 2003 single he made with the Guadeloupean singer Jocelyne Labylle, the Congolese singer Cheela and the Congolese rapper Passi, sold more than a million copies.Mr. Desvarieux, whose immunity was weakened because he had had a kidney transplant, was hospitalized with Covid-19 on July 12 and placed in a medically induced coma before his death.Information on survivors was not immediately available.Throughout the band’s career, even after Kassav’ was signed to multinational labels and encouraged to sing in English, the band’s lyrics were always in French Antilles Creole, insisting on its island heritage. “The music is a stronger language than the language itself,” Mr. Desvarieux said in 1986. “If the music pleases, the language isn’t important.” More

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      Dennis ‘Dee Tee’ Thomas, Saxophonist for Kool & the Gang, Dies at 70

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      Mr. Thomas was a co-founder of the band, which was known for its hits such as “Celebration,” “Get Down on It” and “Jungle Boogie.”Dennis “Dee Tee” Thomas, a saxophonist and a founding member of the band Kool & the Gang, died on Saturday in New Jersey. He was 70.Mr. Thomas died in his sleep, according to a statement from his representatives that did not specify a cause of his death or where in New Jersey he died.Mr. Thomas was a co-founder of the long-running band Kool & the Gang, known for hits such as “Celebration,” “Get Down on It” and “Jungle Boogie.” He saw the band, which experimented with sounds from soul, funk, jazz, pop and R&B, through numerous lineup changes.Mr. Thomas was a “huge personality” in the band, his representatives said, and he helped style the performers’ wardrobes to ensure “they always looked fresh.”“Dennis was known as the quintessential cool cat in the group, loved for his hip clothes and hats, and his laid-back demeanor,” the statement said.The band won a Grammy Award in 1978, the decade when several of its upbeat hits climbed the charts.Around the time the band won a Grammy, it entered a slow period before adding a new vocalist, J.T. Taylor, and adapting its sound to match the disco sensibilities of the era. The group re-emerged in 1979 with the smash “Ladies’ Night,” an ode to a night of partying and dancing.Kool & the Gang, which formed in 1964, experimented with sounds from soul, funk, jazz, pop and R&B.Echoes/RedfernsThe band members followed the hit with the 1980 song “Celebration,” a timeless classic that embodied the group’s buoyant sound. The track became a staple at sporting events and any other displays of joy and enthusiasm. The song was inducted into the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress, an honor reserved for 25 songs every year that showcase the rich heritage of American music.The band members lent their voices to the 1984 charity single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” A number of the decade’s biggest artists recorded the track to draw attention to a famine in Ethiopia.Mr. Thomas formed Kool & the Gang in 1964 with six of his friends — Robert Bell, known as Kool; Ronald Bell; Spike Mickens; Ricky Westfield; George Brown; and Charles Smith. They first called themselves the “Jazziacs,” the statement said, before settling on the name “Kool & the Gang,” a nod to Robert Bell.“We learned that we had to simplify, that most simple music will grab a wide part of the audience,” Mr. Thomas told The New York Times in 1973, about choosing the group’s musical style. “Everybody in the group was a jazz musician at heart, but we knew we had to play R&B to make money.”Mr. Thomas was the band’s “budget hawk” in the early days, his representatives said, adding that he could be seen “carrying the group’s earnings in a paper bag in the bell of his horn.”Mr. Thomas’s alto saxophone solos were featured on several of the band’s tracks. He could also play the flute and percussion instruments, and he was the master of ceremonies at the band’s shows.His last performance with the band was on July 4 at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.Dennis Thomas was born on Feb. 9, 1951, in Orlando, Fla. He and his parents moved to Jersey City, N.J., when he was 2 years old, The Times reported in 1973. He grew up in the city’s Lafayette section, where he met the other founding members of Kool & the Gang.“We want to play a universal music,” Mr. Thomas said in 1973. “We want to lift our audiences up so they think about what they’ve heard.”The band had a dozen top 10 hits on the Billboard charts, and the group received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2015.Mr. Thomas was married to Phynjuar Saunders Thomas and lived in Montclair, N.J., his representatives said.One of his daughters, Michelle Thomas, was an actress on television shows, including “The Cosby Show,” “Family Matters” and “The Young and the Restless.” She died in 1998 of cancer at age 30. He was also preceded in death by another of his daughters, Tracy Jackson.In addition to his wife, he is survived by his daughter Tuesday Rankin; his sons David Thomas and Devin Thomas; his sisters Doris Mai McClary and Elizabeth Thomas Ross; his brother Bill Mcleary; an aunt and several nieces, nephews and grandchildren, the statement said. More

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      Britney Spears’s Father Fights Effort to Remove Him as Conservator

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      A lawyer for James P. Spears said in court papers that Mr. Spears loves his daughter and that he is not to blame for some of the actions to which she has objected.One day after a lawyer for Britney Spears asked the court to expedite the hearing on whether to remove her father from the conservatorship that has long ruled her life, the singer’s father defended his actions over the past 13 years in a court filing.James P. Spears agreed to an accelerated timeline for the hearing, but objected to the effort to suspend him as conservator, arguing that he has taken good care of his daughter and is being blamed for actions undertaken by others with roles in the conservatorship.Last week, Ms. Spears’s lawyer filed a petition to remove her father as conservator of the singer’s estate, a move that was expected after Ms. Spears told the court the arrangement was “abusive” and that her father should be charged with conservatorship abuse. On Thursday, her lawyer asked the court to consider that request earlier, arguing that Ms. Spears is suffering psychologically and financially while her father is in control.In the court document, filed on Friday, Mr. Spears’s lawyer, Vivian Lee Thoreen, wrote that he would agree to moving the hearing date from Sept. 29 to as early as Aug. 23. But she fiercely opposed the assertion by Ms. Spears’s lawyer, Mathew S. Rosengart, that Mr. Spears needed to be swiftly removed from the arrangement.“Mr. Spears has dutifully and faithfully served as the conservator of his daughter’s estate without any blemishes on his record,” Ms. Thoreen wrote. “Mr. Spears’s sole motivation has been his unconditional love for his daughter and a fierce desire to protect her from those trying to take advantage of her.”The filing seeks to shift blame to others who have been involved in Ms. Spears’s conservatorship, which was requested by Mr. Spears in 2008 amid concerns over Ms. Spears’s mental health and potential substance use. It said that Ms. Spears’s former court-appointed lawyer, Samuel D. Ingham III, and a professional conservator involved in the arrangement, Jodi Montgomery, were responsible for admitting Ms. Spears to a mental health facility in 2019 — which Ms. Spears told the court she felt forced into.Mr. Spears’s lawyer said in the filing that he had not been in charge of his daughter’s medical treatment since late 2018.In a statement on Friday, a lawyer for Ms. Montgomery — who has had a role in managing Ms. Spears’s personal and medical care since September 2019 — disputed Mr. Spears’s account. The lawyer, Lauriann Wright, said that at the time Ms. Spears entered the facility, Ms. Montgomery was a case manager of the conservatorship, hired by Mr. Spears, and did not have the authority to admit Ms. Spears to such a facility, saying “only Jamie Spears had that power in March 2019.” She added that Ms. Spears consented to being admitted to the facility.Mr. Spears’s court filing also sought to buttress his argument that he played a critical role in supporting his daughter’s mental health, saying that last month, after Ms. Spears made an impassioned plea to the court to allow her to regain control over her life, Ms. Montgomery called him to ask for help, expressing “concern about Ms. Spears’s recent behavior and her refusal to listen to or even see her doctors.”In her statement, Ms. Montgomery’s lawyer acknowledged that Ms. Montgomery does have concerns about Ms. Spears’s “recent behavior and overall mental health,” noting that Mr. Spears’s continued role as conservator was impacting Ms. Spears’s state of mind and urging him to step down. Ms. Spears’s medical team and her mother have also said that Mr. Spears’s removal is in Ms. Spears’s best interest, according to court papers.The statement from Ms. Montgomery added that her phone call to Mr. Spears was “made out of genuine concern for Ms. Spears” and was “intended to re-establish a working relationship with Mr. Spears towards Ms. Spears’s mental health and well-being.”“Ms. Montgomery implores Mr. Spears to stop the attacks,” the statement said, “it does no good; it only does harm.”As part of Mr. Rosengart’s argument against Mr. Spears continuing as conservator, he wrote that despite what he described as Mr. Spears’s willingness to spend his daughter’s money, he opposed her request in late July to take a brief vacation to Hawaii, calling it “unnecessary.” In the court filing, Mr. Spears disputed that he opposed the vacation.Mr. Spears has long asserted that his stewardship over his daughter’s life has helped to grow and maintain the singer’s $60 million fortune and prevented her from being taken advantage of by outsiders. But in June, the extent of Ms. Spears’s objections to her father’s role became clear when she told the court that he “loved” the control over her life and should be in jail for his actions as conservator. More

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      Paul Cotton, Mainstay of the Country-Rock Band Poco, Dies at 78

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      He joined the band for its third album and expanded its emotional and stylistic palette with his sinewy, blues-inflected guitar work and brooding baritone vocals.Paul Cotton, the lead guitarist and frequent lead singer and songwriter for the country-rock band Poco, died on July 31 near his summer home in Eugene, Ore. He was 78.His wife, Caroline Ford Cotton, said he died unexpectedly but she did not cite a cause. His death came less than four months after that of Rusty Young, Poco’s longtime steel guitarist.Mr. Cotton joined Poco, replacing the founding member Jim Messina in 1970, just in time to appear on the group’s third studio album, “From the Inside” (1971). Produced by Steve Cropper, the guitarist with the Memphis R&B combo Booker T. & the MGs, the project signaled a new artistic direction for the band, maybe nowhere so much as on the three songs written by Mr. Cotton.Rooted more in rock and soul than in the country and bluegrass that had hitherto been the group’s primary influences, Mr. Cotton’s sinewy, blues-inflected guitar work and brooding baritone vocals on songs like the ballad “Bad Weather” greatly expanded Poco’s emotional and stylistic palette.“There was no doubt that he was the guy to replace Jimmy,” Richie Furay, who founded the band with Mr. Messina and was its principal lead singer, said about Mr. Cotton’s impact on the band in a 2000 interview with soundwaves.com. “We knew that he was bringing a little bit of an edge to our sound, and we wanted to be a little more rock ’n’ roll sounding.”Mr. Young said in the same soundwaves piece, referring to Mr. Furay and Poco’s longtime drummer, George Grantham: “You have to remember, we had some very high singing voices at the time. Paul had a much deeper voice, and he had that rock sound.”Poco became a major influence on West Coast country-rock acts like Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles and, a generation later, on alternative-country bands like the Jayhawks and Wilco.Poco in 1972. Seated, from left: Mr. Cotton, Timothy B. Schmit and Rusty Young. Standing: George Grantham, left, and Richie Furay. Ian Showell/Keystone, via Getty ImagesFormed in Los Angeles in 1968, the group originally consisted of Mr. Messina and Mr. Furay, both of them formerly with the influential rock band Buffalo Springfield, along with Mr. Young, Mr. Grantham and the bassist Randy Meisner, a future member of the Eagles. (Timothy B. Schmit, another future Eagle, replaced Mr. Meisner when he left the band in 1969.)Mr. Furay departed in 1973, disillusioned over the group’s lack of success compared with that of his ex-bandmates in Crosby, Stills & Nash and the Eagles, especially after the release of critically acclaimed but commercially disappointing Poco albums like “A Good Feeling to Know” (1972) and “Crazy Eyes” (1973).Poco’s remaining members carried on without Mr. Furay, with Mr. Cotton doing much of the singing and songwriting, until the group went on hiatus in 1977 and he and Mr. Young went into the studio to record as the Cotton-Young Band.In 1978, ABC, the duo’s label, released the recordings, made with British musicians who had accompanied pop hitmakers like Leo Sayer and Al Stewart, but insisted on crediting the band as Poco.“Legend,” the album that resulted, yielded an unanticipated pair of hits, the band’s first and only Top 40 singles: the glittering “Crazy Love,” written and sung by Mr. Young, which reached No. 1 on the adult contemporary chart, and the similarly burnished “Heart of the Night,” written and sung by Mr. Cotton. The album was certified platinum for sales of one million copies.Poco continued to tour and release recordings into the 2000s, with Mr. Cotton, Mr. Young and Mr. Grantham anchoring the lineup.Mr. Cotton performing at a festival in Indio, Calif., in 2009. He spent three decades on and off with Poco and also released a handful of solo albums between 1990 and 2014.Frazer Harrison/Getty ImagesNorman Paul Cotton, the oldest of five children, was born on Feb. 26, 1943, in Fort Rucker, Ala., in the southeast part of the state. His father, Norman, owned a line of grocery stores. His mother, Edna, kept the books for the family business. Young Norm, as he was known as the time, began playing guitar at 13.When he was 16, the Cottons moved to Chicago, where he attended Thornton Township High School. While there he started a band, eventually known as the Rovin’ Kind, that released several singles and appeared on “American Bandstand.”In 1968, after seeing them perform at a club in Chicago, the producer James William Guercio, best known for his work with the jazz-rock band Chicago, signed the group to Epic Records. Mr. Guercio advised them to change their name and relocate to Los Angeles, where they renamed themselves Illinois Speed Press. Mr. Cotton began billing himself as Paul rather than Norm.Illinois Speed Press, with Mr. Cotton and Kal David as twin lead guitarists, released a pair of roots-rock albums for Epic, to little commercial effect. Mr. Cotton was invited to join Poco in 1970, shortly after the release of the band’s second and last album, “Duet.”Besides his wife of 16 years, Mr. Cotton is survived by his sons, Chris and James; two brothers, David and Robert; two sisters, Carol and Colleen; and a grandson.Mr. Cotton spent three decades on and off with Poco and also released a handful of solo albums between 1990 and 2014. An avid fisherman and sailor, he moved to Key West, Fla., in 2005.Poco went through numerous lineup changes during its more than 40 years in existence, but one of the constants, from Mr. Cotton’s arrival in 1970 until his retirement in 2010, was his partnership with Mr. Young.“There’s always been something there,” Mr. Cotton said of his relationship with Mr. Young in 2000.Mr. Young added: “He’s never lost that voice, or that great guitar playing. I can count on him. I wouldn’t want to do this without him.” More