Sometime in the mid-1980s Georgie Fame said: "What I've been doing is rehearsing for 25 years." You may doubt this, since old Fame favourites such as Yeh Yeh and Point of No Return are still pivotal to his show, and conclude that rehearsals for most of the Lancashire-born singer/pianist's repertoire were done with a long time ago.

But Fame's hip timing, downbeat relish for his materials and affection for the company of improvising musicians confirm his point. The wiry 57 -year-old former rock'n'roller, R&B organist and sometime Count Basie singer opened with a set of typically laconic elan. By its later stages a sharp band (bassist Geoff Gascoyne, Fame's sons James and Tristram Powell, horn players Guy Barker and Alan Skidmore and the expressive vibraphonist Anthony Kerr) were also urgently emphasising that it wasn't just there to fill in the riffs.

Fame's cool and knowing singing style is mainly at the service of rhythm, and lyrics are mostly purged of overt emotionalism and turned into instrument-like lines - tonally similar to his principal model Mose Allison, but more casual with the words. He opened the performance with brisk accounts of the Louis Jordan version of Point of No Return and Ray Charles's Get on the Right Track Baby, and at first seemed set to deliver a complete retrospective of his old hits.

Fame's original take on the Charleston theme was mainly remarkable for a fine vibes solo from Anthony Kerr, and he trimmed the lyrics of Yeh Yeh almost to a drumbeat as Guy Barker's trumpet and Alan Skidmore's tenor sax erupted around them. Heated nights in Soho's long-gone Flamingo club were recalled on Preach and Teach, Angel Eyes veered playfully into a medley of songs with the same shape, and Van Morrison's Moondance surfaced with seamless elegance in the latter stages of the Cannonball Adderley hit Janine (Fame could be heard muttering: "Let's see if it works.")

He could have sung the phone book, however, and it would have swung just as effortlessly.