Despite the fact that it takes me no longer to get to Guéret from here than it does to get to Filmhouse from Dicksonfield, lethargy and wine with dinner frequently combine to prevent me from enjoying such nocturnal delights as it offers.

I was tempted to go down on Saturday to experience some electro-pyjama music, a genre that the summer festival brochure tells me is between disco-funky and rock Play-mobil. Given that the electro-pyjama was the warm-up to a concert by Big Sophie you can gauge the extent of my temptation.

Last night however I kept the wine under lock and key and went to a great concert of Duke Ellington and Count Basie standards by this big band.

I thought they were brilliant. I kept my eyes on the alto sax players but I couldn’t uncover their secret. It was very well presented although one peculiarity was that the numbers were introduced (with a lot of interesting information) not by the conductor but by one of the trombonists. He's the left-most one in the picture and instead of just leaning forward to his own mike he clambered past his fellow trombonists each time to get to the lectern that you can see downstage on the right. Approximately 100% of the names of tunes, players and composers that he had to pronounce were of course American and his English pronunciation was often amusing and sometimes incomprehensible. The one I liked best was when he said Sara Vogan for Sarah Vaughan as though she were a German relative of Terry's.

In the picture below you can see the band being congratulated at the end by the Mayor of Guéret. He’s not the man with the pony-tail.

You can catch their singer Anne Ratsimba on Myspace. She’s worth listening to and watching her sing is no hardship either.

Further delights in this festival are a musical bar crawl tomorrow, neatly dignified as a barathon, from early evening to the wee sma hours with a lunchtime prologue, and a day of open air fun around the lake on Sunday.

I’m tempted even to lay Sunday’s golf aside but maybe it will rain.