Lighted umbrellas

Mrs Withers has been involved in a variety of roles associated with community, welfare and social work, including working with Flexible Leisure Options with Cowra Special Needs Centre.
Cowra Information and Neighbourhood Centre Board Chairperson Richard Neate said the board was very pleased to have Mrs Withers in the role.
He said since the loss of former manager Ms Anne Brien the board had revisited the management structure and was taking advantage of a new start to restructure some responsibilities and clearly define roles.
Under the umbrella of the centres care, Mrs Withers joins managerial colleagues Jan Chivers at Cowra Family Support, Danny Jacket at Home Modifications, Margaret Short at Community Transport and Joyce Chambers, Administration.
Mr Neate said more than ever, community and social work was very important.
He believes just in the past five years, he has seen what he describes as a hardening of the Cowra community, and a widening of the gap between the haves and the have nots.
The centre and its varying services are facing new and harder challenges, but some exciting projects are yielding results.
Some of the projects include a popular basic computer course and involvement in a drama course targeting youth at risk

The best Chicago jazz festivals tend to be grass-roots events, planned by self-styled impresarios and staged in top-notch clubs, concert halls and other felicitous settings.
Consider the 3rd annual Umbrella Music Festival, which during five days last week convened performers from around the world and across the city. Though the artists spoke a variety of musical languages-from free jazz to classical avant-garde-all were linked by a fervent desire to seek out new forms of improvisation and composition.
Some of Umbrella's most effective musicmaking unfolded at Elastic, where this year's featured artist, the iconic reedist John Tchicai, played a rare solo set before a standing-room-only crowd late Friday night.
Tchicai's work on alto and tenor saxophones not surprisingly showed the experimental character of his playing, but also its deep links to jazz tradition. In this regard, he recalled another venerated jazz innovator: Chicago saxophonist Fred Anderson, whose solos unabashedly draw on the techniques of the bebop era in which he came of age.

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