Waterford - They came with chairs, with rolling coolers, with magnums of wine and sixes of beer, with "picnic" dinners of salmon and pesto and marinated sirloin tips, with tables, candles, china and silver.

Dressed in shorts and summer dresses, they quaffed and ate and smoked cigars and talked, talked, talked.

Sitting on the grass, with ants crawling up his slacks, this reviewer was woefully unprepared.

"August Nights at Harkness," produced by the Franks Bombaci Jr. and Sr., aren't your ordinary outdoor concerts. In fact, they're really not so much about the music as they are an alfresco dinner party with tunes to fill any gaps in the conversation.

Wednesday night's show, headlined by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, made that abundantly clear. And, surprisingly, the highlight of the show was Tosh Sheridan, the opening act and a Waterford native, playing solo acoustic guitar.

With the sun sinking low, and the shadows of the trees stretching across the grass, Sheridan played everything from Fats Waller's "Jitterbug Waltz" to a jazzy riff on The Beatles' "Norwegian Wood" to perfection.

And his renditions of two songs by Antonio Carlos Jobim, "Waves" and "Triste," seemed particularly appropriate on this tropically sultry summer evening.

Next up, the Sugarfoot Youth Jazz Band, a group of high school musicians from the area, played and sang such tunes as "All of Me," "Black and Tan Fantasy," and "Watermelon Man," at the kind of tentative tempo common to high school bands.

The highlight of their performance had to be the soprano saxophone solo on "Georgia on My Mind," sweet and poignant without being saccharine, but the performer's name was not available.

Meanwhile, audience members talked, laughed, ate and drank, and called each other on their cell phones: "I see you. See my arm? (waving) I'm straight back from the stage." And their children kicked balls, played tag and flew kites.

By the time the headliners were due to perform, the crowd had grown to somewhere in the vicinity of 500 or 600 people.

Then the Preservation Hall Jazz Band spent most of their time on stage shucking and jiving rather than playing music. When they did play, they were great, doing such numbers as "Down on Bourbon Street," "Basin Street Blues" and "Blue Yodel Number 9."

But it soon became apparent that they were more about the "Look at us; we're from N'orlins" schtick than the jazz.

The best of their program was a soloist, trumpeter Mark Braud, who showed the folks what a jazz trumpet should sound like.

Overall, though, they were a disappointment, if you were there for the music.

But then, who was?