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      Huey ‘Piano’ Smith, New Orleans Rock ’n’ Roll Cornerstone, Dies at 89

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      With songs like “Don’t You Just Know It,” “Rocking Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu” and “Sea Cruise,” he put a firm backbeat behind joyful nonsense.Huey “Piano” Smith, whose two-fisted keyboard style and rambunctious songs propelled the sound of New Orleans R&B into the pop Top 10 in the late 1950s, died on Feb. 13 at his home in Baton Rouge. He was 89.His daughter Acquelyn Donsereaux confirmed his death.Mr. Smith wrote songs that became cornerstones of New Orleans R&B and rock ’n’ roll perennials, notably “Rocking Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu,” “Don’t You Just Know It” and “Sea Cruise.”As a pianist and bandleader, Mr. Smith was known for strong left-hand bass lines, splashy right hand and forceful backbeat. He didn’t take center stage; his band, the Clowns, was fronted by a group of dancing lead vocalists, among them Bobby Marchan, who often performed wearing women’s clothes.Mr. Smith’s lyrics were full of droll wordplay and irresistible nonsense-syllable choruses. “I use slangs and things like that,” he was quoted as saying in John Wirt’s biography, “Huey ‘Piano’ Smith and the Rockin’ Pneumonia Blues” (2014), “When you put the music with words and things together, the songs just make themselves. And after you listen at it, it says something its own self, that you hadn’t planned.”Mr. Smith’s songs have been covered by Aerosmith, the Grateful Dead, Johnny Rivers, Patti LaBelle, Deep Purple and many others. But he struggled to collect royalties through more than a decade of lawsuits, and in the 1990s he filed for bankruptcy. His song “Sea Cruise” was handed over by his label to a white singer, Frankie Ford, whose voice was overdubbed atop the backing track recorded by Mr. Smith and his band.A publicity photo of Mr. Smith from early in his career. He and his group, the Clowns, had a national hit in 1957 with “Rocking Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu.”Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesHuey Pierce Smith was born on Jan. 26, 1934, in New Orleans, the son of Arthur Smith, a roofer and sugar cane cutter, and Carrie Victoria (Scott) Smith, who worked at a laundry. He taught himself to play boogie-woogie piano, strongly influenced by the New Orleans master Professor Longhair, and by his teens he was performing regularly at the Dew Drop Café, a top Black club in what was still a segregated city. He formed a duo with Eddie Lee Jones, who performed and recorded as Guitar Slim and who gave him the “Piano” moniker. He also backed Lloyd Price and other New Orleans performers onstage.Mr. Smith also became a regular session player at J&M, the recording studio owned by Cosimo Matassa, where the sound of classic New Orleans R&B was forged. His piano opens the Smiley Lewis hit “I Hear You Knocking,” and he was also heard on recordings by Earl King, Little Richard and many others.He formed the Clowns in 1957 and had a nationwide hit that year with “Rocking Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu” (later versions often rendered it as “Rockin’”), which reached No. 5 on Billboard’s rhythm-and-blues chart and No. 52 on the pop chart. A medical-minded follow-up, “Tu-Ber-Cu-Lucas and the Sinus Blues,” didn’t fare as well.With his new career as a bandleader thriving, Mr. Smith married Doretha Ford in 1957. They had five children before they divorced in the mid-1960s.Mr. Smith and the Clowns reached the pop Top 10 in 1958 with the wry “Don’t You Just Know It.” The title was a phrase often used by the band’s bus driver, Rudy Ray Moore, who would go on to a career as a bawdy comedian and the star of the “Dolemite” movies.That same year, Mr. Smith recorded “Sea Cruise.” Johnny Vincent, the owner of his label, Ace Records, was a partner in a distribution company, Record Sales Inc., with Johnny Caronna. The day after Mr. Smith recorded the music for “Sea Cruise,” planning to have the Clowns add vocals, Mr. Caronna claimed the song for a teenage singer he was managing, Frank Guzzo, professionally known as Frankie Ford.According to Mr. Wirt’s biography, Mr. Smith was told, “Johnny Vincent agreed that if you can sell a million on this record, Frankie can sell 10 million” — and, he later recalled, “It hurt me to my heart when he told me he was taking that.”Mr. Vincent, who died in 2000, also claimed co-writing credits on many songs Mr. Smith wrote and recorded for Ace, including his hits, although he later relinquished those credits. Mr. Smith moved to Imperial Records as the 1950s ended, but he returned to Ace to record a rollicking holiday album, “’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” on which he declaimed the title poem over a jaunty horn section.With the British Invasion of the 1960s, guitar-driven rock supplanted piano-centered New Orleans R&B on the pop charts. Mr. Smith continued to record on the Pitter Pat and Instant labels through the late 1960s, under his own name and others, and he had some regional hits. He also wrote and produced songs for other performers, notably Skip Easterling, who had a hit across the South in 1970 with Mr. Smith’s funk reworking of the Muddy Waters standard “Hoochie Coochie Man.”Mr. Smith married Margrette Riley in 1971. She survives him, along with his children Ms. Donsereaux, Sherilyn Smith, Huerilyn Smith, Hugh Smith, Katherine Smith, Tanisha Smith, Tyra Smith and Glenda Bold; his stepson, James L. Riley Jr.; 18 grandchildren; and 47 great-grandchildren.Barely able to make a living from his music in the early 1970s, Mr. Smith turned to other work. He started a gardening business, Smith’s Dependable Gardening Service. He also became a Jehovah’s Witness and gave up drinking and smoking.Meanwhile, the value of his old songs was increasing. In 1972, Johnny Rivers’s remake of “Rocking Pneumonia” reached No. 6 on the pop chart. Dr. John included a medley of Mr. Smith’s songs on his album “Dr. John’s Gumbo,” and Ace Records rereleased Mr. Smith’s songs on compilation albums. Mr. Smith performed occasionally as the 1970s ended. At the New Orleans club Tipitina’s and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 1979 and 1981, he reunited with singers from the Clowns’ peak years. At the 1981 festival, his musicians included the Meters’ rhythm section: George Porter on bass and Zigaboo Modeliste on drums.Mr. Smith moved to Baton Rouge in 1980 and stopped performing soon after that. His catalog continued to be heard — in cover versions, on movie soundtracks, in commercials and in reissues — but bad deals deprived him of much of his royalty income.In a series of lawsuits from 1988 to 2000, Artists Rights Enforcement Corporation — a company Mr. Smith had engaged in 1982 to help collect back royalties and then fired in 1984 — demanded and won a 50 percent share of Mr. Smith’s ongoing royalty income from four of his biggest songs, including “Rocking Pneumonia.”Mr. Smith declared bankruptcy in 1997; by then, he had pawned his piano. When full rights to the four songs were sold for $1 million to the publisher Cotillion Music in 2000, Mr. Smith remained entitled to foreign royalties but netted less than $100,000 to escape bankruptcy.The Rhythm & Blues Foundation gave Mr. Smith its $15,000 Pioneer Award in 2000, and he gave his last major performance at the foundation’s gala. He was inaugurated into the Louisiana Blues Hall of Fame in 2001.Mac Rebennack, the New Orleans pianist, guitarist and singer who recorded as Dr. John, received vital early songwriting guidance from Mr. Smith, according to Mr. Wirt’s biography. “Anyone who can talk can write a song,” he recalled being told. “So whatever you got to say, play good music and say it. You just put it where you need to say it.”Mr. Smith, Mr. Rebennack said, also advised, “If you don’t have a song that’s got some kind of simple melody people can hum, sing with and roll with, it’s like, what do you got?” More

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      Julie Powell, Food Writer Known for ‘Julie & Julia,’ Dies at 49

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      She documented her attempt to cook every recipe in Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” in a popular blog that became a best-selling book and a hit movie.Julie Powell, the writer whose decision to spend a year cooking every recipe in Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” led to the popular food blog, the Julie/Julia Project, a movie starring Meryl Streep and a new following for Mrs. Child in the final years of her life, died on Oct. 26 at her home in Olivebridge, in upstate New York. She was 49.Her husband, Eric Powell, said the cause was cardiac arrest.Ms. Powell narrated her struggles in the kitchen in a funny, lacerating voice that struck a nerve with a rising generation of disaffected contemporaries.The Julie/Julia Project became a popular model for other blogs, replicated by fans of the cooks Ina Garten, Thomas Keller and Dorie Greenspan, and helped build the vast modern audience for home cooking on social media.In 2002, Ms. Powell was an aspiring writer working at a low-level administrative job in Lower Manhattan. She was about to turn 30 and had no real career prospects. It was, she said in an interview with The New York Times, “one of those panicked, backed-into-a-corner kind of moments.”To lend structure to her days, she set out to cook all 524 recipes from her mother’s well-worn copy of Mrs. Child’s 1961 classic “Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1.” But as an untrained cook who lived in a small Long Island City loft, she found the road to be long, sweaty and bumpy.In a blog for Salon.com that she called the Julie/Julia Project, she wrote long updates, punctuated by vodka gimlets and filled with entertaining, profane tirades about the difficulties of finding ingredients, the minor disappointments of adult life and the bigger challenges of finding purpose as a member of Generation X.Before the year was up, Salon reported that the blog had about 400,000 total page views, as well as several thousand regular readers who hung on the drama of whether Ms. Powell would actually finish in time.Blogging made it possible for Ms. Powell to reach readers on a relatively new platform and in a new kind of direct language. “We have a medium where we can type in the snarky comments we used to just say out loud to our friends,” she said in a 2009 interview.Those comments were posted just as popular interest in food, cooking and chefs was rising. Ms. Powell’s self-deprecating style became a bridge from the authority of food writers like Mrs. Child, James Beard and M.F.K. Fisher to the accessibility of Rachael Ray, Bobby Flay and Nigella Lawson.Just weeks before Ms. Powell’s self-imposed deadline was up, Amanda Hesser, a founder of the website Food52 who was then a reporter for The Times, wrote about her project, and interest exploded.The Julie/Julia Project upended food writing, Ms. Hesser said in an email. “I’d never read anyone like her,” she wrote. “Her writing was so fresh, spirited — sometimes crude! — and so gloriously unmoored to any tradition.”Ms. Powell inspired other amateur food writers to begin cooking their way through cookbooks and made professional food writers realize “they’d been stuck in the mud of conformity,” Ms. Hesser said. “The internet democratized food writing, and Julie was the new school’s first distinctive voice.”The writer Deb Perelman, who started her food blog (now called Smitten Kitchen) in 2003, said: “She wrote about food in a really human voice that sounded like people I knew. She communicated that you could write about food even without going to culinary school, without much experience, and in a real-life kitchen.”Little, Brown & Company turned the blog into a book, “Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen.” Although some critics wrote that it lacked literary heft, it went on to sell more than a million copies, mostly under the title given to the paperback: “Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously.”Amy Adams as Ms. Powell in front of a photo of Meryl Streep as Mrs. Child in a scene from “Julie & Julia.”Columbia Pictures, via AlamySales spiked after the popular 2009 movie “Julie & Julia,” Nora Ephron’s last work as a writer and director, which starred Ms. Streep as Mrs. Child; Stanley Tucci as her husband, Paul; and Amy Adams as Ms. Powell.Ms. Powell “was happy for the story to be Nora Ephron’s story,” said Mr. Powell, a deputy editor at Archaeology magazine. “It did kind of sand down the quirky and the spiky and a lot of the things everyone knew her for and loved her for. And she was OK with that.”The film’s success also lifted Mrs. Child’s book to the best-seller list for the first time.Mrs. Child never saw the film — she died in 2004 — but she was familiar with Ms. Powell’s project.Russ Parsons, a former Los Angeles Times food editor who was among the first to report on the blog, sent Mrs. Child, then in her 90s, some excerpts. She took the project as an affront, not the self-deprecating romp that Ms. Powell intended, and told Mr. Parsons that she and others had tested and retested the recipes so they would be accessible to cooks of all skill levels.“I don’t understand how she could have problems with them,” he recalled her telling him. “She just must not be much of a cook.”Ms. Powell in her apartment in 2005, chopping leeks to make Ms. Child’s recipe for potato leek soup.Henny Ray Abrams/Associated PressJulie Foster was born on April 20, 1973, in Austin, Texas, to John and Kay Foster. Her father was a lawyer. Her mother stayed home to care for her and her brother, Jordon, and then went back to college for a master’s degree in design from the University of Texas.Ms. Powell graduated from Amherst College in 1995 with a bachelor’s degree in theater and fiction writing.As a child, her brother said, Ms. Powell was both bookish and dramatic.“She loved to be onstage, and loved just being over the top and having everyone watch her,” he said. And, he added, she was “the most experimental and sophisticated cook among us, and we were all people who cooked.”She met the man who would become her husband when they were playing the romantic leads in a high school production of the Arthur Miller play “All My Sons.” They married in 1998.Ms. Powell’s second book, “Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession,” published in 2009, dived deeply into their relationship, which sometimes flourished and sometimes faltered. She described in detail her struggle with an extramarital affair she had and, later, one her husband had. This time, the food connection was darker: She juxtaposed her apprenticeship as a butcher with a dissection of her moods and the marriage.Without the sauciness and celebrity connection of her first book, “Cleaving” was not as well received, and although Ms. Powell continued writing, it was her last book.“She had so much talent and emotional intelligence,” said Judy Clain, editor in chief of Little, Brown, who was Ms. Powell’s editor. “I only wish she could have found the next thing.”After years splitting time between Long Island City and a cozy house in the Catskill Mountains that she purchased in 2008, the couple moved upstate permanently in 2018. In addition to her husband and her brother, Ms. Powell is survived by her parents.Ms. Powell, who was politically candid and a staunch advocate for animals, maintained her lively voice on social media, a natural extension for the quirky and direct voice she honed as an early blogger. On Twitter, she posted pointed commentary, mixed in with mundane bits of daily life. As ever, she made her feelings public, whether she was depressed, frustrated or excited.Mr. Powell, her husband, once said to her: “You hate everyone and you love everyone. That is your gift!” She turned it into her Twitter bio. More

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      Conductor Dies After Collapsing During Performance in Munich

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      Stefan Soltesz was in the middle of Richard Strauss’s “The Silent Woman” when he fell from his podium shortly before the end of the first act.MUNICH — Stefan Soltesz, a prominent and in-demand Austrian conductor, died on Friday night after collapsing during a performance at Munich’s main opera house.Mr. Soltesz, 73, was conducting the Richard Strauss opera “The Silent Woman” at the Bayerische Staatsoper, or Bavarian State Opera, when he fell from his podium shortly before the end of the first act. He was pronounced dead at a hospital several hours later, said Michael Wuerges, the spokesman for the company.“At some point, the music stopped,” said Sebastian Bolz, 35, a research assistant in the music department at Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, who attended the performance with his wife. He said that they did not see the conductor’s fall shortly before 8 p.m., but that they did hear calls for help from the stage and orchestra pit.Mr. Wuerges said that the theater’s on-site doctor and a heart specialist from the audience attended to Mr. Soltesz. Shortly after the conductor’s collapse, the curtain fell on the stage and Tillmann Wiegand, the artistic operations manager of the Bavarian State Opera, announced that there had been an emergency and that there would be an immediate 30-minute intermission.Once the audience filed back into the auditorium at the end of the break, Mr. Bolz said, Mr. Wiegand reappeared onstage to announce that the remainder of the performance would be canceled. Shortly before 11 p.m., the State opera’s general manager, Serge Dorny, used Twitter to announce Mr. Soltesz’s death. “We are losing a gifted conductor,” he wrote. “I lose a good friend.”Deaths at the podium are rare, but Mr. Soltesz is the fourth conductor to collapse midperformance at the National Theater, the Bavarian State Opera’s main venue, since the early 1900s.In 1911, the Austrian conductor Felix Mottl collapsed at age 56 during his 100th performance of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” and died 11 days later; the German maestro Joseph Keilberth died at age 60 at the podium in 1968 during a performance of the same work. Most recently in Munich, in 1989, the Italian conductor Giuseppe Patanè collapsed at age 57 during Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” and died hours later at a hospital.At Berlin’s Deutsche Opera in 2001, Giuseppe Sinopoli, 54, an intensely physical maestro, had a heart attack while conducting Verdi’s “Aida.” He died at a hospital hours later.Mr. Soltesz, who was born in 1949 in Hungary, conducted at major opera houses across Europe over the past four decades. He held musical directorship positions at the State Theater of Brunswick, in Germany, from 1988 to 1993, and at the Flemish Opera in Antwerp and Ghent, in Belgium, from 1992 to 1997. His most recent appointment was in Essen, Germany, where he led that city’s opera house, the Aalto Theater, as well as the Essen Philharmonic from 1997 to 2013.“He took this Central German theater in Essen and he turned it, in 17 years, into one of the best ensemble houses in Europe, and he turned the Essen Philharmonic into an absolute A-grade orchestra,” the Australian opera director Barrie Kosky, who collaborated with Mr. Soltesz on four productions at the Aalto Theater in the early 2000s, said on Saturday after learning of Mr. Soltesz’s death. Mr. Kosky was speaking from Salzburg, Austria, where he was rehearsing a new production of Janacek’s “Kat’a Kabanova” that he is directing next month at the Salzburg Festival.During his career, Mr. Soltesz also led performances throughout Asia, and in 1992, he made his United States debut with the National Opera with a performance of Verdi’s “Otello” at the Kennedy Center in Washington. Mr. Soltesz is survived by his wife, Michaela Selinger, a mezzo soprano.“He was a very fine, refined musician, and music, you know, was first. He came second,” Mr. Dorny, a Belgian impresario who said he had known Mr. Soltesz since the 1990s when he ran the Festival of Flanders, said on Saturday.“He was the perfect diener for the art form,” Mr. Dorny added, using the German word for servant.On Friday night, Mr. Soltesz was conducting a revival of Mr. Kosky’s 2010 production of Strauss’s rarely performed “The Silent Woman,” as part of the Bavarian State Opera’s summer festival. Mr. Soltesz had previously led other revivals of the production. And it was one of several throughout Germany that he and Mr. Kosky had worked on together.“He was an amazing musician,” Mr. Kosky said, singling out Mr. Soltesz’s interpretations of Strauss for high praise, adding, “He understood the idea of orchestra accompanying, and understood the idea of the architecture of an act — or a three-act opera. He understood that, and he was at home in the pits. That was his home.”“In a world of dilettantes,” Mr. Kosky said, “he was the real thing.” More

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      Criminal Charges Still Possible in ‘Rust’ Shooting, Sheriff Says

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      Newly released evidence shows the leads investigators pursued as they try to learn how a live round got into Alec Baldwin’s gun, which fired, killing the film’s cinematographer.Six months after Alec Baldwin fatally shot a cinematographer on the set of the film “Rust” while practicing with a gun that had been improperly loaded with live ammunition, Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza said Tuesday that “I don’t think anybody is off the hook when it comes to criminal charges.”Live ammunition is not supposed to be used on film sets. In an interview on NBC’s “Today” show, Sheriff Mendoza said that no one had admitted to bringing live rounds onto the set of “Rust,” but indicated that he was concerned by evidence suggesting that a member of its crew had expressed interest in using live ammunition while working on a previous film.“There was information from text messages that was concerning, based on the fact that live ammo was spoke about and was possibly used on a prior movie set,” Sheriff Mendoza said in the interview, “and that was just a few months before the ‘Rust’ movie set and production began.”He appeared to be referring to text messages from the “Rust” armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who was responsible for gun safety on the set, in which she indicated that she had expressed interest in shooting “actual ammunition” last summer when she was working on a Nicolas Cage Western called “The Old Way,” which was filmed in Montana.Ms. Gutierrez-Reed texted Seth Kenney, who provides weapons and ammunition for film productions, in August and asked him whether she could “shoot hot rounds,” according to a summary of the text exchange released this week by investigators.Mr. Kenney texted her back, asking what she meant by “hot round.”“Like a pretty big load of actual ammunition,” Ms. Gutierrez-Reed replied.Mr. Kenney told her to never shoot live ammunition out of guns being used on a film set, texting, “It’s a serious mistake, always ends in tears.”“Good to know,” Ms. Gutierrez-Reed replied, according to the case report. “I’m still gonna shoot mine tho.”The summary of the text exchange was included in a tranche of evidence and investigative reports that was released Monday by the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office. The documents indicated some of the threads that detectives have been following as they try to determine how live ammunition got into the gun Mr. Baldwin was practicing with on Oct. 21 when it discharged, killing the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins.The Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office released silent footage of Alec Baldwin practicing a scene with a revolver on the set of the Western before accidentally shooting and killing the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins.The newly released evidence paints a picture of a sometimes chaotic film set, where some crew members had expressed concerns about gun safety and, after Ms. Hutchins’s death, some crew members disparaged others in texts and to investigators.The sheriff’s office said on Monday that it is waiting on several key pieces of evidence that it needs to complete its investigation.Jason Bowles, a lawyer for Ms. Gutierrez-Reed, said in an email that his client’s text messages indicated that she had been asking Mr. Kenney, then a mentor, when she could fire rounds “through a historical weapon to see how it functioned.” He said that she never intended to fire it during production or while on the set.“Hannah has never brought live rounds to any movie set nor has she ever fired them on set,” Mr. Bowles said in the email.Ms. Gutierrez-Reed was 24 and had been working as an armorer for less than a year when she took the “Rust” job, her second as an armorer. The daughter of a well-known Hollywood armorer named Thell Reed, she told detectives that she had been “handling guns her whole life.”Ms. Gutierrez-Reed’s discussion of live ammunition on the Montana film set is not the only thread investigators have been following.Around the same time that Ms. Gutierrez-Reed was on the set of “The Old Way,” her father and Mr. Kenney were in Texas training actors in the Paramount+ Western series “1883,” according to notes from a detective’s interview with Mr. Reed from November. Part of Mr. Reed’s job was training actors with live ammunition in an area away from the set, and he told a detective that the rest of his ammunition ended up being left with Mr. Kenney.One of the questions investigators have focused on is where the ammunition used on “Rust” came from. Mr. Kenney supplied “Rust” with ammunition and about 30 guns, and Ms. Gutierrez-Reed sued Mr. Kenney and his company earlier this year, alleging that the company had in fact supplied the movie with a mixture of dummy rounds and live ammunition.Understand What Happened on the Set of ‘Rust’Card 1 of 6A fatal shooting. More

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      Alec Baldwin Seeks Dismissal of ‘Rust’ Lawsuit

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      Lawyers for the actor Alec Baldwin and other producers behind the film “Rust” filed a motion on Monday seeking to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the movie’s script supervisor, who was feet away from the actor on the movie set in New Mexico when he fatally shot a cinematographer.The script supervisor, Mamie Mitchell, said in her lawsuit, filed last year, that she was standing nearby when the gun fired a live bullet that killed the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, and wounded the film’s director, Joel Souza. Mitchell then ran out of the wooden church set that had been the backdrop for the scene and called 911.The lawsuit claimed that Ms. Mitchell “sustained serious physical trauma and shock and injury to her nervous system and person” as a result of her proximity to the shooting. It accused Baldwin of “intentionally, without just cause or excuse,” cocking and firing the revolver in a scene that did not call for it.In Monday’s court filing, lawyers for Mr. Baldwin wrote that he could not have intentionally shot a live bullet from the gun because shortly before it discharged, the movie’s first assistant director called out “cold gun,” indicating that the old-fashioned revolver being used as a prop did not contain any live bullets and should have been safe to handle.“It is completely illogical for plaintiff to contend defendant Mr. Baldwin received a prop gun that everyone including plaintiff and defendant Mr. Baldwin expected to be ‘cold,’ while at the same time stating that Mr. Baldwin’s conduct was intentional in accidentally firing a live round,” the filing said.Mr. Baldwin said in a television interview last year that he did not pull the trigger of the gun while he was practicing on set that day. He said he did not fully cock the hammer of the gun, but pulled it back and let it go in an action that might have set it off.The filing from Mr. Baldwin’s and the production’s lawyers also asserted that Ms. Mitchell’s grievance did not qualify as a complaint under New Mexico’s workers’ compensation law.Ms. Mitchell’s lawsuit targeted the production more broadly for making a series of what she called “cost-cutting measures,” including hiring a 24-year-old armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who was just starting out her career as a lead armorer in the industry. Ms. Gutierrez-Reed’s lawyer has said that she was dedicated to safety on set; she filed her own lawsuit against the film’s supplier of guns and ammunition.The production’s court filing said that Ms. Mitchell’s allegations relied on “a list of things that she contends, in hindsight, should or should not have been done” to ensure safety on set; the production’s lawyers argued that her case was insufficient and should be dismissed. More

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      Carlos Marín, a member of Il Divo, dies at 53.

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      Known for his broad vocal register, he was part of a quartet that helped make popular the genre of operatic pop, or “popera.”Carlos Marín, a Spanish singer and a member of Il Divo, the hit multinational quartet, died in Manchester, England, on Sunday, according to the musical group and local news media reports. He was 53.“It is with heavy hearts that we are letting you know that our friend and partner, Carlos Marín, has passed away,” Il Divo wrote in a post on Twitter on Sunday.“He will be missed by his friends, family and fans. There will never be another voice or spirit like Carlos,” Il Divo added. “We will miss our dear friend.”The musical group did not specify a cause of death. He was admitted to the intensive care unit of a hospital in Manchester on Dec. 8, where he was intubated and put in an induced coma, according to a report on Spanish television.Mr. Marín had already had Covid-19 last year. After suffering the disease, he expressed in a video his relief, as well as hope that this would help protect him from another infection.“I’m lucky enough to be now immune, I’m taking great care of myself, I wear my mask, they will force us to get vaccinated and I hope things relax and they allow us to work,” he said in the video, posted last December. Mr. Marín was born in Rüsselsheim, a German city about 30 miles southwest of Frankfurt, on Oct. 13, 1968. At 8 years old, he released his first album. Later, he moved with his family to Madrid, where he went on to study piano and singing at the city’s Royal Conservatory.In 2003, Mr. Marín, known for his broad vocal register, joined Il Divo together with Urs Bühler, from Switzerland, David Miller from the United States and Sébastien Izambard from France. The quartert, known for their soupy, romantic covers, helped make popular the genre of pop opera, known as “popera,” and went on to sell millions of albums.“Singing is my way of saying what I feel, my way of life,” Mr. Marín is quoted as saying on the musical group’s website. Sometimes, he added, the music could make him feel melancholy and at other times; joyful.“Singing is what makes me feel alive,” Mr. Marín added. “So thank you.”Raphael Minder contributed reporting. More

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      Before the Astroworld Tragedy, Travis Scott’s ‘Raging’ Made Him a Star

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      The multiplatinum rapper earned a reputation for concerts that teetered on the edge of mayhem. Then eight people died during his performance in Houston on Friday.Travis Scott has always been a showman first and foremost.A master of marketing who is equally skilled at curating big-name collaborators and exclusive experiences, Mr. Scott is a figure of few words and little eye contact who isn’t known as a technically adept rapper or a dynamic offstage celebrity. Instead, he has built his multiplatinum, widely licensed name as an avatar of excess and a conductor of energy — an electric live performer who prioritizes how his music makes you feel (and act).Since 2015, when he established himself as a reliable concert headliner, Mr. Scott (born Jacques B. Webster) has gained an international reputation as a star attraction and an evangelist for good-natured physical expression — what he calls “raging” — whipping up mosh pits, crowd-surfers and stage-divers as his shows teeter on the edge of mayhem. In a rare trajectory, the smash hits came only later.“The way he interacts with his crowd, he’s one of the only artists that when he comes on, he can vibe with every single person,” one fan explained in the Netflix documentary “Travis Scott: Look Mom I Can Fly,” from 2019. Amid montages of blood, sweat and colliding bodies, another added: “You can fall and everyone will pick you up. It’s weird how one person’s music can turn everyone into such a family.”Such expressive, loosely choreographed rowdiness — a common and longtime feature of live performances across musical milieus, including metal, punk and ska — does not necessarily equate with mass danger.But Mr. Scott’s attempts to balance a kind of community-based catharsis with the powder keg of a rambunctious young crowd — which has led to accusations that he has incited fans and encouraged unsafe behavior — tipped decisively toward tragedy on Friday night in Houston, where eight people were killed and hundreds more injured as the rapper performed the final set of the night at the third iteration of his Astroworld festival.Several people died and dozens of others were injured at a Travis Scott concert in Houston, after a large crowd began pushing toward the front of the stage. Video showed crowds amassing earlier in the day, as about 50,000 people attended the festival.Amy Harris/Invision, via Associated PressAuthorities are still investigating what caused the surges in the audience of 50,000, and how that contributed to the “mass casualty event,” which lasted for an estimated 40 minutes, according to law enforcement. The Houston police chief, Troy Finner, said officials worried that ending the show sooner could have caused a riot.Mr. Scott said in a video statement on Instagram that despite acknowledging an ambulance in the crowd, he did not realize the extent of the emergency. He noted that he typically halts his concerts to make sure injured fans can make it to safety, adding: “I could just never imagine the severity of the situation.”Representatives for Mr. Scott said on Monday that he would cover all funeral costs for those who died at Astroworld, while also providing refunds to all attendees who bought tickets. The rapper has also canceled his upcoming headlining appearance on Saturday at the Day N Vegas festival, they said.While crowd-control disasters have occurred at rock concerts, religious celebrations and soccer matches, the incident in Houston has quickly turned Mr. Scott’s biggest selling point and foundational philosophy as an artist into a flash point about his culpability after years of encouraging — and participating in — extreme behavior by his fans.Twice before, Mr. Scott has been arrested and accused of inciting riots at his concerts, pleading guilty to minor charges. In an ongoing civil case, one concertgoer said he was partially paralyzed in 2017 after Mr. Scott encouraged people to jump from a third-floor balcony and then had him hoisted onstage.Yet those incidents only served to bolster the legend of the rapper’s live shows, with footage of stretchers, wheelchairs and the daredevil stunts that may have necessitated them — like leaping from lighting structures — used to illustrate Mr. Scott’s roving carnival of a career.By Sunday, however, an official commercial for this year’s Astroworld festival that emphasized such imagery had been removed from YouTube.Mr. Scott atop an Austin crowd in 2013, during the early days of his career.Rick Kern/WireImage, via Getty ImagesFinding an identity onstageMr. Scott, a Houston native who dropped out of the University of Texas to pursue music, became a protégé to Kanye West in 2012. Using Mr. West’s inclination toward cultural pastiche, along with the genre-hopping, fashion-forward templates of artists like Kid Cudi and ASAP Rocky, Mr. Scott quickly emerged near the forefront of a micro-generation of rappers — Playboi Carti, Trippie Redd, Lil Uzi Vert — who brought a punk-rock sensibility to the mass scale of modern rap, especially in concert.After a few high-profile guest appearances and two mixtapes released in 2013 and 2014, Mr. Scott’s first studio album, “Rodeo,” was released by Epic Records and the rapper T.I.’s Grand Hustle label in 2015. Just a year earlier, Mr. Scott was playing for tiny audiences. But following his proper debut, the musician began realizing his dreams of ambitious stage design and adrenaline to match.In a 2015 GQ segment called “How to Rage With Travis Scott,” the rapper linked his childhood fantasy of becoming a professional wrestler to his later desire to make his concerts “feel like it was the WWF.”“Raging and, you know, having fun and expressing good feelings is something that I plan on doing and spreading across the globe,” Mr. Scott said. “We don’t like people that just stand — whether you’re Black, white, brown, green, purple, yellow, blue, we don’t want you standing around.”A concert review from Complex that year was titled, “I Tried Not to Die at Travi$ Scott and Young Thug’s Show Last Night,” calling the concert “the most dangerous safe haven” and “a turnt-up fight for survival.”But as Mr. Scott’s diverse audience expanded and his operation professionalized, he also ran up against the limits of his amiable anarchy. At the Lollapalooza festival that summer in Chicago, the rapper’s set was cut off five minutes in, after he told fans to rush the barricades, flip off security and chant, “We want rage,” resulting in a stampede that injured a 15-year-old girl. Mr. Scott later pleaded guilty to reckless conduct and was put under court supervision for a year.In 2017, Mr. Scott was arrested again following a performance in Arkansas, where he was charged with inciting a riot for encouraging fans to rush the stage and bypass security. He eventually pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for disorderly conduct, and paid a $7,465.31 fine.The 2019 Netflix documentary “Travis Scott: Look Mom I Can Fly” traced the rapper’s evolution into a live performer with a specific aesthetic.NetflixA superstar expands his influenceMr. Scott’s celebrity soon skyrocketed. The same year as his arrest in Arkansas, he joined the extended Kardashian universe as the boyfriend of Kylie Jenner; the couple had a daughter, Stormi, in 2018 and are now expecting their second child.But it was the release of Mr. Scott’s third album, “Astroworld,” in the summer of 2018, that cemented him among the upper echelon of superstar performers — and salesmen. The album release was paired with an extensive merchandise collection that drove purchases, and it helped lead to collaborations with McDonald’s, Hot Wheels, Nike, Reese’s and more.“Astroworld” also featured the rapper’s first Billboard No. 1 single, “Sicko Mode,” with Drake, a feat Mr. Scott would repeat three more times from 2019 to 2020. He has collected eight Grammy nominations since 2013, released three chart-topping albums and is known as a streaming juggernaut.After recreating rodeos and flying atop an animatronic bird over his crowds, Mr. Scott staged an international tour for “Astroworld” — named for a defunct Six Flags theme park near where he grew up — that featured a functional roller coaster that shot out over the audience.Rolling Stone called it “the greatest show in the world,” comparing Mr. Scott’s “unhinged leaping” to Michael Jackson’s moonwalking, while The Washington Post crowned the rapper “one of the most electrifying performers of the moment,” a “maestro directing the chaos.”Amid his big-budget diversification, Mr. Scott used his blockbuster release to kick off the festival of the same name, building on the industry trend of big-tent, weekend-long concerts branded and curated by major artists. (Astroworld was canceled in 2020 because of the Covid-19 pandemic; still, 28 million viewers watched Mr. Scott perform within the video game Fortnite.)The Netflix documentary “Look Mom I Can Fly” chronicled the lead-up to the “Astroworld” album and the first edition of the festival. But even as it underlined Mr. Scott’s penchant for stoking hype — fast-forwarding through the empty crowds of his early career to the bedlam of Lollapalooza, Arkansas and his pyrotechnic-heavy arena shows in hectic, high-voltage footage — there were moments that gestured toward the need for caution, as well.Mr. Scott is seen chastising security and egging his crowd on, but he is also shown multiple times pausing onstage as seemingly unconscious bodies are lifted through the crowd to be treated. “I feel bad, though,” he says following his release from jail in Arkansas. “I heard about kids getting hurt.”Ahead of another show, a member of the rapper’s team is shown backstage, preparing the venue’s security staff.“Our kids, they push up against the front and spread all the way across that and fill in the whole front floor, so the pressure becomes very great up against the barricade,” the man, whose face is blurred in the footage, tells them. “You will see a lot of crowd-surfers in general, but also you see a lot of kids that are just trying to get out and get to safety because they can’t breathe, because it’s so compact.”“You won’t know how bad it can be with our crowd,” he adds, “until we turn on.” More