Roy Ayers Ubiquity, Jazz Café, London

When a musician can claim to have played to your father and even your grandfather you know he's either lying or is of an age when he shouldn't be inviting audiences to feel the vibes. Well, at 63, age doesn't seem to bother Roy Ayers, the vibraphonist who, at the Jazz Café, danced, clowned and stomped around like a man half his age.

Among Ayers's band of merry men was Ray Gaskins, whose party piece is playing the saxophone and keyboards at the same time. And it never fails to impress: tonight he even found time, with one hand clawing at the keys, the other racing over the sax, to adjust a slightly wonky mike.

Before Ayers went on stage, his main concern was how he was going to enter the arena with sufficient impact to quell the audience's impatience at his being more than 30 minutes late for the scheduled 9pm start.

In keeping with the showman that he is, Ayers, wearing a black-and-white striped suit with a white fedora finished off with a red band, ran through the dining area of the venue, down the back stairs and without even a cursory hello, was straight into "Can't You Feel Me".

The high-energy start did not let up all night. His opening song, taken from a pool of 88 albums starting in 1963 with West Coast Vibes and spread over a prolific recording period of more than 40 years, was quickly followed by "Running Away" and "Evolution".

The funky solos from the band offered Ayers time to pause for breath, and a chance for his musicians to show off. When Ayers again took centre stage he used the opportunity to express his comic talents. "We live in London, baby, we shop in Tescos, baby," - the lyrics to the original "We Live in Brooklyn Baby" are somewhat different, as he went on to demonstrate. But it typified a man who was having fun at a time in his career when he can afford himself a few laughs.

Ayers is a survivor, a musical Goliath whose resilience has seen him at the start of the Sixties emerge from the jazz school of hard bob, graduate to funk, specialise in fusion and r&b, before drawing the template for acid jazz in the Nineties. He is now an icon of the hip-hop fraternity; his distinctive vibe sound being sampled ad infinitum. But then Ayers's musical catalogue allows him such elevated status among fellow musicians.

At the Jazz Café he only scratched the surface of his vast songbook. "Searchin'", a rousing rendition of Dizzy Gillespie's "Night In Tunisia", and "Everybody Loves the Sunshine" were just a few of the favourites he performed. Had he wished, he could have played all night; and I dare say, the young, appreciative and lively crowd would have happily stayed awake to be entertained by a man who is charging through his sixth decade and who may well, indeed, have played to their grandparents.