World music is growing in popularity in Britain, yet it is often presented as "serious" music to be sat and listened to. So the audience for Alan Skidmore and the South African percussion group Amampondo took an awfully long time - most of the gig, in fact - before finally deciding to get up and dance.

The musicians gave an accomplished enough performance, but you can't help wondering how much greater the energy and enthusiasm would have been had they been playing to a festival crowd.

The concert began with a bit of aural scene-setting. Steve Melling played a swelling chord on an electric keyboard, while the splendidly attired South Africans began a soft and soulful chant embellished with imitation birdsong. Skidmore provided a count-in and then the drummers were off, crescendoing swiftly into a polyrhythmic barrage over which Skidmore's saxophone and Ingolf Berkhardt's trumpet played a surging, Mingus-like opening theme.

As a life-long Coltrane devotee, Skidmore is eminently capable of matching an African percussion group in conjuring elemental forces from his horn. After the opening number, however, the mood abruptly changed to bouncy carnival, with many of the pieces adopting a calypso-like feel. These were pleasant, but lacked musical variety - a problem that might not have mattered had the audience felt able to move around.

Four members of Amampondo raised cheers with a spectacular display of prowess on a huge marimba-like instrument whose name even Skidmore couldn't pronounce. Members of the group also danced in and around the audience blowing strange ethereal wails through curved animal horns.

Not the most ground-breaking or impassioned jazz-world fusions ever staged, but certainly a pleasant way to spend a cold November evening.