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WHITTIER – It’s “All Aboard” this Christmas at the Whittier City School District, where members of its fledgling Dads Clubs have been working for weeks to put their best foot forward next month during the city’s annual holiday parade.
And they’re doing it in typical dad style: by using their hands and trusty power tools to create a 20-foot float featuring a four-car train with a cozy holiday scene, complete with a Christmas tree and gifts.
The float project is part of the group’s commitment to the community, which is the theme for the 56th annual Whittier Christmas Parade, said Mike Harding, Dads Club president at Hoover Elementary School.
The Hoover Dads Club had a small float in last year’s parade – so when Harding told Superintendent Ron Carruth that the group wanted to do it again, Carruth suggested he expand the project to include the other schools’ Dads Clubs.
And for several weeks now, anywhere from 10 to 15 volunteers from the different Dads Clubs have gotten together on the weekends to build the float designed by Hoover Dads member Vito Adragna, which will include an engine car, flat car and caboose.
“The flat car will have a Christmas tree with gifts, and we’re thinking of having an elf on top, waving to everyone during the parade,” Harding said.
They’re also hoping to get two military veterans – one each from the Army and Marines – to ride the float along with one Dads Club representative and children from each school.
“I love the statement our dads are making by coming together to place this float in the parade,” Carruth said.
The parade takes place Dec. 12, so Dads Club members say they’ll be spending much of their free time over the next couple of weeks making sure the float is ready for its public debut.
“We’re just following Vito and Hoover school and learning from them because they’ve done it before,” said John Avila, a Dads Club member from Orange Grove Elementary in West Whittier.
Russian stocks, rouble shrug off U.S. "oligarchs' list"
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian assets showed little reaction to Tuesday’s release of a U.S. report naming major Russian businessmen among a list of people close to President Vladimir Putin, with stocks and the rouble both firmer by afternoon trade.
Publication of the U.S. Treasury department’s “oligarchs’ list” had threatened to prompt a sell-off in Russian assets but its impact was blunted by the United States saying on Monday that it would not immediately impose new sanctions on Russia.
The list of 210 people nevertheless casts a shadow of potential sanctions risk over some of Russia’s biggest firms. Putin labeled the list an “unfriendly act” that would further complicate relations between Moscow and Washington.
Stocks had dipped in early trade, led by shares in major banks and companies whose bosses were named on the U.S. list, but soon recovered.
The Moscow Stock Exchange’s dollar-denominated RTS index was up 1.15 percent at 1,290.21 points as of 1217 GMT after briefly touching its lowest since Jan. 19 at 1,266.48.
The rouble-based MOEX Russian index, previously known as MICEX, was 0.3 percent higher at 2,290.19 points, inching toward an all-time high of 2,328.48 it hit last week.
“Really, a ‘black swan’ has not occurred, but the message of a worsening of bilateral relations is quite clear,” said Danske Bank analyst Vladimir Miklashevsky.
He said investors would be reassured that Russian central bank governor Elvira Nabiullina was not named on the list.
The central bank declined to comment on any possible market impact of the U.S. report.
The Russian rouble strengthened, shrugging off a 0.6 percent decline in Brent crude futures to $69.06 per barrel.
Against the dollar, the rouble gained 0.6 percent to 55.98, heading toward its strongest level since early July 2015 it hit last Thursday.
Versus the euro, the rouble was 0.3 percent stronger at 69.51.
Shares in Sberbank, Russia’s no.1 lender, whose chairman German Gref was named on the list, rallied to an all-time high of 258.96 rubles ($4.63) after nodding lower at the market opening.
Another U.S. report outlining potential restrictions on investment by foreigners in Russian government debt was not published on Tuesday as many had expected.
That helped push yields on Russia’s 10-year OFZ bonds lower, to 7.33 percent from around 7.43 percent.
“Non-residents have started buying OFZ bonds but rather cautiously,” said Alexei Pogorelov, an economist with Credit Suisse in London.
ING chief economist Dmitry Polevoy said the response from Western business partners would determine the list’s impact.
“It will be important how Western, European businesses react since they do, in one way or another, work with the companies whose owners are now on this list,” Polevoy said.
Lightning illuminates the sky over Queensland as Australia's monsoon season continues.
The weather pattern involves a seasonal wind shift accompanied by an increase in atmospheric moisture and precipitation.
A creek turns into a raging torrent as flash flood warning are issued for portions of the state.
U.S. Air Force Capt. Jessica Tait shares the latest details on how rescuers are trying to evacuate the young soccer team and their coach stuck in a cave in Thailand.
Now Playing: What is a monsoon?
US wireless carriers Verizon and T-Mobile are working to take control of the growing spam and robocall epidemic for their mobile customers.
Verizon is deploying the STIR/SHAKEN caller ID technology to its network to help customers identify and handle unwanted robocalls. It also began offering its Call Filter spam and robocall protection service for free; previously, it was a $3 per month add-on.
T-Mobile expanded its Caller Verified feature, which alerts customers to likely scam calls, to seven additional smartphone models. The feature, which also uses STIR/SHAKEN protocols, was initially launched in January 2019 on the Samsung Galaxy S9 lineup.
Here's what it means: Verizon and T-Mobile are recognizing that the spam and robocall epidemic is a much bigger — and growing — issue than they initially thought.
Robocalls are becoming more common. Nearly 48 billion robocalls were made in 2018, which is a 57% increase over 2017, according to third-party robocall-blocking software company YouMail.
Scam calls are growing their share of total calls in the US. Scam calls are predicted to account for almost half (45%) of all calls made to US mobile numbers in 2019, up from just under one-third (29%) in 2018 and 4% in 2017, according to First Orion.
Consumers are getting vocal about the issue. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reported that consumers filed more than 4.5 million robocall complaints in 2017, marking a 33% increase from 3.4 million the prior year. And we expect there were even more complaints in 2018, with 2019 likely to follow suit given that these calls are becoming more prominent.
The FCC is taking action. The FTC announced this month that it'd shut down four large-scale automatic dialing and robocalling operations that were responsible for billions of unwanted calls each year. And in December, the FCC voted to classify text messages as an information service to help carriers better protect consumers from fraudulent or unwanted text messages.
The bigger picture: How carriers have handled robocalls is another example of them being slow to react to issues, a trend that could ultimately hurt how they're viewed by consumers.
They've also been slow to respond to data privacy issues. In January 2019, it was revealed that real-time location data from carriers, including AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint, had found its way into the hands of bounty hunters via location data aggregators.
After the report, carriers announced that they'd stop working with these firms. However, many of them enacted timelines for doing away with the practice, leaving room for more issues to occur. US wireless carriers risk losing their customers' trust by not being proactive in implementing steps to address issues that hurt their subscribers.
The appearance of Ornette Coleman, who has died aged 85, at the Barbican in London in 2001, with a supporting cast of rappers, dancers, video artists, sufi vocalists, opera singers and Chinese traditional musicians, spectacularly symbolised this self-taught musician’s lifelong conviction that all good music is one. Back in London eight years later as the curator of the Meltdown festival, the dynamic Coleman did it again (this time with the singer-poet Patti Smith, the Senegalese griot Baaba Maal, guitarist Bill Frisell and a Moroccan drum choir), and found himself mobbed by fans crowding down the aisles of the Royal Festival Hall to shake his hand, long after the concert’s last chord had faded. It was a spontaneous display of gratitude for a gently indomitable vision that had radically changed the music of the previous half-century not just by revolutionising the intonation, phrasing and shared languages of jazz bands and soloists, but also by offering new ways for contemporary musicians in all genres to communicate with each other.
Ornette was born in Fort Worth, Texas, to Randolph, a construction worker and cook, who died when Ornette was seven, and Rosa, a clerk for a funeral director’s. The variety of his music obscured the fact that, at root, he was one of the greatest geniuses of a simple song, the song of the blues. Coleman stripped down and simplified the conventional harmonic framework of jazz, remoulding the raw materials of improvisation and casting off the formal and technical bonds of the bebop style dominating jazz during his childhood. But his saxophone sound was steeped in the slurred notes and rough-hewn intonation of 19th-century singers and saloon-front guitarists at work before jazz was even born. His affecting tone swelled with the eloquence of the human voice.
His most enduring ambition was to imagine shared frameworks within which an impulsive and spontaneous music could emerge with the minimum of formality. From collaborations with symphony orchestras to dialogues with musicians and cultures far removed from jazz, his instantly recognisable themes retained that songlike forthrightness, and a childlike frankness and grace.
The young Coleman responded to the quicksilver lyricism of the 1940s bop sax idol Charlie Parker, but his early adaptations of Parker’s harmonically complex ideas to the simpler structures of R&B and country blues were derided by fellow musicians and local audiences. His early sound was a mix of Parker phrases, a blues shouter’s rawness and a sax-beginner’s assortment of honks, squeaks and split notes, played in an apparently random relationship to the chords of the underlying tune.
When Coleman, playing the heavier tenor sax at this point, delivered his findings at a Gulf Coast dance in the late 1940s, he was beaten up, and the sax destroyed. He returned to the alto, supported himself with menial jobs, and worked obsessively on radically rethinking the relationship between melody, harmony and rhythm in jazz to set improvisation free. In New Orleans in 1949, he met a young traditional jazz and R&B drummer, Ed Blackwell, whose enthusiasms – like Coleman’s, based on collective rather than soloist-and-backing improvisation – seemed to make him more open to the young saxophonist’s intuitiveness than most of the theoretically advanced bop generation.
Moving to Los Angeles to play R&B, periodically working as an elevator operator, Coleman immersed himself in musical theory. What emerged was the basis of a completely new approach to improvising. In 1951 he got together with Blackwell in Los Angeles, and drew in New Orleans musicians including the pianist Ellis Marsalis. Another young drummer, Billy Higgins, appeared on Coleman’s horizon as a Blackwell-like player mixing passionate, unembroidered directness and intense swing. Higgins’s trumpet-playing former school-mate Don Cherry also entered the circle.
Like Coleman, Cherry favoured expressiveness of tone over technical gymnastics. The partners began to fold the saxophonist’s ideas into new bop-related but startlingly fresh-sounding compositions, and as the Jazz Messiahs, with James Clay on tenor sax, Coleman’s revelations began to be displayed to the public.
In 1958, a group including Cherry and the pianist Walter Norris made Coleman’s recording debut, Something Else!!!!, for the Los Angeles jazz label Contemporary Records. Later that year, the Canadian piano virtuoso Paul Bley, then in residence at the Hillcrest Club, LA, hired Coleman and Cherry to join the bassist Charlie Haden and Higgins in his own group.
Their journeys into uncharted musical waters quickly got them all fired from the Hillcrest, though not before they had made what became a cult live recording there. Coleman’s music in this breakthrough year suggested bebop’s quick, twisting, somewhat baroque melodies, but it was looser, wilder and bluesier. These exploits were also the last occasions Coleman would perform with a pianist for 30 years – he found fixed-note harmony instruments too rigid for the improvising flexibility he sought.
Early in 1959, Coleman made his second album for Contemporary. Tomorrow Is the Question! was bursting with exquisite originals – one of which, the lament-like Tears Inside, became a classic. His playing was by now a partly planned, partly serendipitous mingling of tonal, atonal and microtonal music (the exact pitch of Coleman’s notes defy the tuning fork), infused with the blues.
Prestigious musicians began to take an interest – notably the composer, brass player and musicologist Gunther Schuller, and John Lewis, the pianist-leader of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Lewis arranged for Coleman’s group to record for the high-profile Atlantic label. That move led to the albums The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959) and Change of the Century (1960). Through Lewis, Coleman and Cherry attended the Lenox School of Jazz in Massachusetts in 1959, alongside Dave Brubeck and George Russell. Russell, working on radical theories himself, acknowledged that hearing Coleman’s ideas brought a rethink in his own efforts to loosen improvisation from the dictatorship of chord-patterns.
Ornette Coleman – Tomorrow Is the Question!
Coleman groups, variously featuring Higgins or Blackwell on drums, began to appear on the conventional jazz circuit, and controversy followed. Some dismissed the saxophonist as an untutored fraud and others hailed him as an untutored genius. Coleman’s adoption of a plastic alto sax (at first for economic reasons, and later because he preferred the sound) increased his reputation for eccentricity. The 1961 album Free Jazz – with its famous, and symbolic, Jackson Pollock painting on the cover – was an unbroken collective improvisation for two quartets playing simultaneously, and it was to be a formative influence on younger free-improvisers all over the world in the 1960s and early 70s. Coleman was also experimenting with modern classical music and serialism, and played on the album Jazz Abstractions (1961), which included a Schuller work for jazz band and string quartet.
Coleman took a sabbatical from 1962 to explore the trumpet and violin, which he took to playing with a colourful but approximate, broad-brush waywardness that suited the ends of his music very well. However, these casually adopted additions to his sound palette brought yet more criticism, and the formidably affronted saxophonist and broadcaster Benny Green wrote that “like a stopped clock, Coleman is at least right twice a day”. But when he returned to touring in 1965, a following was growing with Coleman, notably in Europe. With a great trio featuring the former classical bassist David Izenzon and the direct and crisply swinging drummer Charles Moffett, he remained in Europe through 1965, recording a superb pair of live albums for Blue Note (At the Golden Circle Stockholm, volumes 1 and 2).
Jazz giants including Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus and Miles Davis publicly dismissed the newcomer’s work – though the latter’s 1960s bands undoubtedly represented selective use of free-jazz methods – but Coleman began to be perceived as a catalyst for change in contemporary classical music too.
Between the mid-1960s and the early 70s his forays into this field included Inventions of Symphonic Poems, Sun Suite of San Francisco and the symphonic work Skies of America. The last, a logistically troubled session recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra at Abbey Road in 1972, reflected Coleman’s unfamiliarity with the potential of such a large ensemble and the compromises needed to make the segments fit jazz-radio airplay slots. But the sax improvisations over the orchestra retained their old fire, and the symphony contained the original idea for his famous, hypnotically looping theme Dancing in Your Head.
Coleman’s small jazz ensembles began to include a second saxophonist – the tenorist Dewey Redman – at the end of the 60s, and Haden, Higgins and Blackwell returned. But the next decade saw adventurous jazz being increasingly displaced by progressive rock, with a younger public more likely to be interested in the jazz-aware Frank Zappa’s multi-genre experiments than Coleman’s. John Coltrane’s more overtly spiritual music, inspired by Indian classical forms and religious thinking, had also become a popular manifestation of jazz for the hippie generation.
But Coleman’s broad interests – from the earthiest of dance and blues styles to 20th-century classical music – offered him alternatives to acoustic jazz without compromising his beliefs. By 1975, after explorations with drummers in Morocco and a typically oblique reappraisal of funk, Coleman reappeared with a powerful electric band, Prime Time. A minimalist-melody ensemble that played in a kind of noisy trance, it developed to include two electric guitarists – playing brittle counter-melodies rather than chords – alongside two bass guitarists and two drummers.
The group sound spliced the rhythmic intricacy of African drum-choirs, the directness of funk and the unpredictability of free improvisation. Coleman invented a name for the band’s approach – harmolodics, a conflation of harmony, movement and melody – facilitating the simultaneous playing of a given melody line by different instruments at different pitches. Coleman’s son, Denardo, from his 10-year marriage to the poet Jayne Cortez, was a drummer and sometimes a Prime Time member, and in his father’s later years became a constant accompanist and source of support.
By the late 1980s, Coleman’s enfant terrible status had been displaced by a kind of respectability. Younger players, including the fusion guitarist Pat Metheny, loved his music. Metheny recorded with him on the superb album Song X (1985). The film-maker Shirley Clarke celebrated the saxophonist’s career in Ornette: Made in America (1985) and recitals of Coleman’s contemporary classical music were given at Carnegie Hall. Prime Time continued to perform, but evolved to include keyboards, as well as Indian classical percussionists. A double album, In All Languages (1987), was made for both the electric band and the re-formed classic 1960s acoustic quartet, each interpreting the same pieces.
In 1991, Coleman and the Master Musicians of Jajouka performed on the score for the David Cronenberg film The Naked Lunch, and in 1994 the pianist Geri Allen joined Coleman’s New Quartet, with Moffett’s son Charnett on double bass, and Denardo on drums. In a characteristically contrary move, he made his two back-to-back Sound Museum albums with this group – the sessions featuring the same band on almost exactly the same material, in a challenge to listeners to detect and savour minuscule differences.
Coleman was now unreservedly welcomed into the mainstream. The MacArthur Foundation gave him five-year funding from 1994 and Lincoln Center’s Coleman showcase in 1997 featured Skies of America with an orchestra and Prime Time combined; trio, quartet and quintet recitals; and a theatrical event surrounding Prime Time with acrobats and fire-eaters. After a decade-long hiatus from recording, Coleman returned to the studio in 2005 to record the album Sound Grammar, for a new quartet featuring two double-bassists (one bowing and the other playing pizzicato), with Denardo on drums, and the leader playing alto saxophone, trumpet and violin. As ever, Coleman was seeking maximum fluidity between his players, the blues wail from his saxophone was as moving as ever, and the album received a Pulitzer prize. Coleman also put in a vibrant guest appearance on the former Prime Time bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma’s For the Love of Ornette five years later.
Coleman is survived by Denardo.
Some prizes you win can change your life and some prizes you win could save your life.
Watch NewsChannel 4 at 6 p.m. for your chance to win a tornado shelter from NewsChannel 4 and Thunderground Tornado Shelters.
We know how violent our weather can be living in Oklahoma, so this is your chance to win a free tornado shelter.
You can call in or text to win.
When popular video game Minecraft mixes with Frank Lloyd Wright, you get Wrightcraft, a virtual walk through some of the architect's iconic projects.
Where Can You Find a Frank Lloyd Wright in California? You Might Be Surprised.
Few architects have left such a lasting impression and legacy as Frank Lloyd Wright. His works dot across the United States. For the intrepid, here's a map of his works in California, including a few hidden gems.
Walk through, the Ennis House, the last of Frank Lloyd Wright's textile block houses in Los Angeles and a star in its own right.
Walk Through One of the Earliest Frank Lloyd Wright Homes in L.A.
Located in the Hollywood Hills, this privately-owned Wright House was originally built for Dr. John Storer. See how time has treated this Frank Lloyd Wright home.
Most of Isamu Noguchi's playscapes remained undeveloped in his lifetime. But today, major public spaces are taking their cue from the iconic designer.
Roughly 90 years later, the legacy of San Luis Obispo's Motel Inn still stands, along with part of the original building.
The brainchild of architect Arthur S. Heineman, the Milestone Mo-tel — later known as the Motel Inn — ushered in a new era of convenience and comfort when it opened in 1925.
Scheduled to open in 2020, the Main Museum of Los Angeles Art will occupy three buildings in the heart of downtown's historic core.
Take a peek at the Silverlake Conservatory of Music's new building.
It was established to fill the gaps left by budget cuts to music education. Now the Silverlake Conservatory of Music, co-founded by Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, has a shiny new building that's eight times larger than it's former storefront home.
What Can the Dry Silver Lake Reservoir Teach Us About the Future Ecology of Los Angeles?
When will the Silver Lake Reservoir be refilled? This open question is a chance to rethink how the dry infrastructure can be seen as a resource for the city and as a model for other sites around the Los Angeles area.
If walls could speak, an important 19th century landmark in San Diego, La Casa de Estudillo, would convey a complex past. For a period, craze for a novel -- Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 “Ramona” -- added to the site’s appeal and transformation.
Route 66 has been mythologized in popular culture since it was established as a national highway in 1926. Two new projects re-contextualize the road for the 21st century.
The arrival of the Wilshire Grand tower represents a new shift in skyscraper architecture in Los Angeles.
The Future of Housing in L.A.
The emerging L.A. we’re seeing now is one that’s rediscovering its public spaces, moving past the car and the single-family house, anxious about displacement and economic inequality and in many ways having to relearn the art of sharing the city.
How Well Do You Remember The Pure Moods Commercial?
It was probably the favorite CD of the Sears Air-Conditioning Couple.
1. What is the first song sampled?
2. Where was this multi-platinum collection "direct from"?
3. Which track "takes you on a trip into the unknown"?
4. "Set adrift with timeless pleasures of..."
5. Who had two tracks sampled in the ad?
6. ... And which track was the second one that was sampled by that artist?
7. What is the very last song audio-sampled?