Dockyard -- October 16 South Africa's Jonathan Butler stole the show on the first night of the Bermuda Jazz Festival.

Butler teamed up perfectly with a truly superb saxophonist to really get the crowd going.

The sax player -- I think called Mandy Abraham, but it was hard to catch her name -- and Butler's guitar combined perfectly to heat up the night.

And the crowd responded well to Butler's distinctive brand of African-flavoured music, his good-humoured instructions enticing the audience to join in with gusto.

His song Celebration -- with atmospheric percussion evoking the sounds of the African veldt intertwined with Butler's powerful voice -- was a real crowd-pleaser.

And the 40 minutes or so he was on stage wasn't nearly long enough judging by the standing ovation earned by Butler and Abraham -- plus the genuine calls for an encore.

But it was just as well Butler -- preceded by the bitter-sweet sound of Bermuda's Gita Blakeney and the ever-dependable Wendell (Shine) Hayward -- was up to scratch.

For the other two acts -- the Rippingtons with Russ Freeman and Lee Ritenour -- were so middle of the road they ought to have had white lines painted up their backs.

Jazz -- in all its forms -- is generally a bit more free-form than other styles of music.

But, paradoxically, that perhaps demands a little more discipline from its performers to avoid lurching into the self-indulgent and overblown.

And both the Rippingtons and Ritenour, while undeniably technically proficient, failed to take the audience along with them as they went round in pretty, but in the end fairly tedious, musical circles.

Jazz out of the Hotel California compared to jazz out of Africa really doesn't cut it, I'm afraid.

The festival also suffered from other problems -- the 7 p.m. ferry to the event apparently left Hamilton almost half-an-hour late and nobody seemed to know when the last one was scheduled to leave Dockyard for the city.

Estimates from the security personnel varied from between 11.30 p.m. to 12.30 p.m. and when the Bermudian docked, the crew said it would leave "when there were enough people on board.'' It's inevitable that an event like the Jazz Festival will overrun past the official end, in this case midnight, and it was rather frustrating for dozens of people who left the concert for the last ferry and sat on board for 45 minutes catching bits of Ritenour if the wind was right.

But the entire evening was marred by poor organisation, right from the start when nobody appeared to know where the press was supposed to sit.

This reviewer ended up on a plastic chair well off to the side, giving a great view of the crowd, but a pretty poor one of the stage.

The concessions did their best, but a wait of an hour for two small cardboard containers of deep-fried cauliflower and broccoli -- which left you $15 lighter -- was a bit much. They'd run out of fries, apparently.

The event was sponsored mainly by Conde Nast Traveler -- or Traveller in Bermuda, I suppose, a stablemate of thoroughbred magazines Vogue, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker.

Deep-fried florets of cauliflower with what appeared to be a few lonely-looking breadcrumbs clinging to them may very well be what the international sophisticate is munching this season. But somehow I doubt it.

Raymond Hainey