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    Rebekah Del Rio, Mournful Singer of ‘Mulholland Drive’ Fame, Dies at 57

    Rebekah Del Rio, the virtuosic singer best known for her forlorn Spanish-language rendition of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” in David Lynch’s 2001 film “Mulholland Drive,” died on June 23 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 57.Her death was confirmed by the Los Angeles County medical examiner, who said the cause was under investigation. Ms. Del Rio disclosed in 2018 that a malignant tumor in her brain had been surgically removed. In her final months, she told friends that the cancer had returned.In a career marked by misfortune and tragedy, Ms. Del Rio, a self-taught vocalist, never made it beyond the music industry’s revolving door. But her transcendent vibrato found a home in a surreal corner of Hollywood occupied by Mr. Lynch.One day in the mid-1990s, Ms. Del Rio, a young country singer, arrived at Mr. Lynch’s Los Angeles home for an introductory meeting arranged by their mutual agent, Brian Loucks. The instructions Mr. Loucks gave her were simple: Show up on time, look cute and be ready to perform “Llorando,” her a cappella version of Mr. Orbison’s “Crying.”Dressed head to toe in light blue, she sang until Mr. Lynch cut her off halfway through. He ushered her into his home recording studio, where she recorded the song in a single take.“Ding dang, Rebekah Del Rio, that was aces!” she recalled him saying.That recording would be heard in a pivotal scene in “Mulholland Drive,” at a fictional nightclub called Club Silencio. Ms. Del Rio, who is introduced as “La Llorona de Los Angeles,” emerges onstage from behind a velvet curtain wearing a dark red minidress, with smudged mascara and a crystalline teardrop under her right eye.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

    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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    Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath Play Final Shows in Birmingham, England

    Heavy metal fans crossed continents to converge on Birmingham, England, and throw devil horns in honor of the Prince of Darkness and Black Sabbath.They came by the thousands.They dressed in black, with T-shirts featuring crucifixes, dragons and demons.They gathered on Saturday in Birmingham, England, to pay their respects to a figure of almost religious significance in the heavy metal world: Ozzy Osbourne, the Prince of Darkness.Since Osbourne and his bandmates Tony Iommi, Bill Ward and Geezer Butler, formed Black Sabbath in Birmingham in 1968, they have been regarded as the fathers of heavy metal.On Saturday, Osbourne, 76, was at the center of “Back to the Beginning,” a 10-hour concert at the Villa Park soccer stadium that he had said would culminate in Black Sabbath’s final stage appearance.Chris Hopkins from Birmingham showing his Black Sabbath tribute tattoo.Ellie Smith for The New York TimesOzzy Osbourne masks.Ellie Smith for The New York TimesAnshul Doshi, center with beard, who lives in England, and an entourage that traveled from India for the concert.Ellie Smith for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Hunt for a 316-Year-Old Stradivarius Stolen in the Fog of War

    The violin by the famed Italian luthier was plundered at the end of World War II and presumed lost or destroyed. Now experts say they believe it has resurfaced.As Germany devolved into chaos at the end of World War II, a rare violin from the famed shop of the Italian luthier Antonio Stradivari was plundered from a bank safe in Berlin.The instrument, crafted in 1709 during the golden age of violin-making, had been deposited there years earlier by the Mendelssohn-Bohnke family as Nazi persecution put assets owned by Jews in jeopardy.For decades after the war, the family searched to no avail for the violin, known as the Mendelssohn, placing ads in magazines and filing reports with the German authorities. The violin, valued at millions of dollars, was presumed lost or destroyed.The Mendelssohn Stradivarius is shown here in black-and-white photos before it was stolen. It bears striking similarities to an instrument that passed through a New York auction house in 2000, shown here in color.Carla Shapreau; Mendelssohn-Bohnke Papers; TarisioNow, the Mendelssohn may have resurfaced. An eagle-eyed cultural property scholar, Carla Shapreau, recently came across photos from a 2018 exhibition of Stradivarius instruments in Tokyo. She spotted a violin that bore striking similarities to the Mendelssohn, though it has a different name — Stella — and creation date — 1707 instead of 1709.“My jaw dropped,” said Shapreau, a senior fellow with the Institute of European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, who had been searching for the instrument for more than 15 years.

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    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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    5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Art Blakey

    For a time in the late 1940s, Art Blakey went to live in West Africa. When he returned to the United States, he told reporters that his time there had given him a fresh appreciation for the music called jazz. This, he declared, was a Black American music — quite distinct from the folk forms he’d heard in Africa.Yet at the same time, Blakey’s experiences in the motherland — where he’d converted to Islam and taken the name Abdullah ibn Buhaina — filled him with a knowledge of jazz’s roots, allowing him to hone a style that was deeply polyrhythmic, powerful and directly related to the drum’s original role: communication. With that knowledge, he would change jazz history.“When he plays, his drums go beyond a beat,” Herb Nolan once wrote in a DownBeat profile. “They provide a whole tapestry of dynamics and color.”Blakey had started out playing piano on the Pittsburgh scene during the Great Depression, but after switching to the drums he stood out, joining the famous big bands of Fletcher Henderson and Billy Eckstine. Following his sojourn in Africa, he and other young Muslim musicians in New York formed their own large ensemble, the Seventeen Messengers. After that band broke up, he and the pianist Horace Silver started a smaller group, the Jazz Messengers; before long, Blakey was its sole leader, and with his drumming as the linchpin, the Messengers came to define the straight-ahead, “hard bop” sound of jazz in the 1950s and ’60s.Art Blakey at Cafe Bohemia in New York in the mid-1950s.PoPsie Randolph/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesBlakey kept the band together for decades, frequently replenishing its lineup with young talent, so that the Messengers became known as jazz’s premier finishing school. “Once he saw that you’d learned the lesson, it was time for you to go,” the saxophonist Bobby Watson recalled of his time as a Messenger in the 1970s and ’80s. He added, “He was one of the most positive people I ever met, and he loved young people. He used to say, ‘There’s nothing wrong with being young — you just need some experience.’ And that’s what he provided.”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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    What to Know About Bob Vylan, the Band at the Center of a Scandal

    British police are investigating and the band lost its U.S. visas after a member called for “death” to Israel’s army at a festival.Before this weekend, Bob Vylan was a rising punk band with about 273,000 monthly listeners on Spotify — hardly a household name.Now, after leading chants of “Death, death to the I.D.F.” in reference to Israel’s army at the Glastonbury festival in England, it has become punk rock’s latest notorious act.On Monday, British police opened a criminal investigation into the chant, shortly after Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Jewish groups condemned it as hate speech.In the United States, the deputy secretary of state, Christopher Landau, said that the State Department had revoked visas for Bob Vylan’s members, meaning the band can no longer play a planned U.S. tour.Despite all the attention now focused on the group, many people had never heard of it before. Here’s what you need to know.Who is in Bob Vylan and what’s its music like?A British punk-rap duo known for fast-paced, politically provocative songs, the group uses pseudonyms and deliberately obfuscates other biographical details. The singer goes by Bobby Vylan and the drummer by Bobbie Vylan.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    How ‘Colors of the Wind’ Became a Generational Rallying Cry

    Thirty years after Disney released “Pocahontas,” the film’s Oscar-winning song has taken on a life of its own with millennial and Gen-Z fans.In January, Lanie Pritchett expressed her displeasure with the second inauguration of President Trump by passionately lip-syncing a 30-year-old Disney song.“I had this rage in me,” the 22-year-old theater major at Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas said in an interview. “It was a rough day for a lot of people. I thought, I can’t do much, but I can share my thoughts.”Her thoughts were encapsulated in a few lines from “Colors of the Wind,” the power ballad from Disney’s 1995 animated film, “Pocahontas.” Specifically, “You think the only people who are people are the people who look and think like you / But if you walk the footsteps of a stranger, you’ll learn things you never knew you never knew.”She uploaded a TikTok video with the overlay, “me arguing with magas for the next four years” — and a caption explaining that her progressive views partly stem from “Pocahontas” being her “favorite princess movie growing up.” It quickly racked up more than half a million views.Pritchett, who is a lesbian, was raised in a conservative household in East Texas, where she and her sister would give living-room performances of “Colors of the Wind” while the “Pocahontas” DVD played in the background. She now views the song as an important commentary on queer inclusivity, cross-cultural understanding and environmentalism.“Obviously, that movie has its problems,” Pritchett said, “but the music was really good.”In fact, 30 years after Disney released “Pocahontas” in theaters in June 1995, the film’s Oscar- and Grammy-winning track has broken out as a beloved entity with millennial and Gen Z fans.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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    Lalo Schifrin, 93, Dies; Composer of ‘Mission: Impossible’ and Much More

    Lalo Schifrin, the Grammy-winning Argentine-born composer who evoked the ticking, ominous suspense of espionage with his indelible theme to the television series “Mission: Impossible” as well as scored movies like “Cool Hand Luke,” “Bullitt” and “Dirty Harry,” died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 93.His wife, Donna, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was complications of pneumonia.Mr. Schifrin had a startlingly diverse career as a composer, arranger and conductor in a wide range of genres — from classical to jazz to Latin to folk to rock to hip-hop to electronic to the ancient music of the Aztecs.He conducted symphony orchestras in London and Vienna, and philharmonic orchestras in Tel Aviv, Paris and Los Angeles. He arranged music for the Three Tenors. He provided what The Washington Post called the music of “rebellious cool” for Paul Newman, Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood.When Mr. Schifrin won an honorary Academy Award in 2018, it was given to him by Clint Eastwood, a frequent collaborator.Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesBut the prolific Mr. Schifrin, who wrote more than 100 film and television scores, was best known for “Mission: Impossible.” Interpretations of his propulsive theme have also been featured in the eight movies in the “Mission: Impossible” series, starring Tom Cruise, which began in 1996.Like John Williams, whose many compositions for film include the theme from “Jaws,” Mr. Schifrin was a master of creating jittery unease and peril. Both composers worked with a recognizable style and a distinct purpose.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