The central issue in jazz is its legitimacy. Is it innocent fun or serious music? The first Bermuda Jazzscape on Friday night at the National Stadium was instructive in how the music's history and development has always been a battle between the two.

The Bermuda Festival has always had jazz performances but true to its inclusive format jazz has never taken centre stage.

The local band Legacy bravely rose to the challenge of opening what is hoped to become a yearly event. Unlike their weird opening for the Ellington Orchestra a couple of years ago the bass heavy fusion was perfect for what was to come! It's original composition "One for Jimmy'' and the blues standard "Stormy Monday'' showed taste and competence and did just what an opening act should do.

The tireless experimenter Herbie Mann has recorded in a myriad of styles from bossa nova and reggae to disco and bebop.

That lifetime has now coalesced into a fully improvisational, multi-national world music band.

With a battery of instruments played in non-traditional ways we were taken back to the origins of jazz when conservatoire trained and unschooled musicians combined to make a new form. Mann, who later said "I don't care about the jazz conservatives,'' kept true to those origins by playing his flute over the swinging rhythm of two acoustic guitars processed through synthesisers and relentless percussion by Sato Takaishi, and Cafe.

Dianne Reeves is certainly out of the Sarah Vaughn bag but stretched beyond the constraints of the supper club. Prowling about the stage in front of a four piece combo that anchored the rapt audience, she sang in Portuguese a song to Yemanja of Yoruba mythology.

She subtly signified on pan-African connections, from Nigeria to Brazil to the United States in Bermuda and while only a portion of the audience could translate all could understand! The audience waited patiently for George Benson to roar onstage. His career has spanned the rift between the pure and vernacular for more than 40 years, both sides took centre stage in turns. Part improviser in the tradition of Wes Montgomery and part loverman like Otis Redding, Benson breezed through his hits with us all like a plectrum in the palm of his hand. He returned for the obvious and obligatory encore to do his most famous hits "Turn your love around,'' "Give me the night,'' "This Masquerade,'' and the show stopper "On Broadway''.

Where Benson's guitar work is blindingly fast but well articulated his singing is the exact opposite, melismatic and mildly guttural -- until he does a wild impression of Nat and Natalie Cole. The estimated crowd of 3,500 rose during the ode to innocence and ambition in New York. Benson obliterated the boundary between popular and straight ahead jazz and bookends the Bermuda Festival performance of Wynton Marsalis this year. See you next year! DESING BURGESS GEORGE BENSON -- Captivated the National Stadium crowd on Friday night.

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