Five years ago I wrote a News Shopper piece celebrating the 80th birthday of a prestigious national music treasure and local jazz hero, bass player Joe Mudele.

Joe's staying power is undiminished because here I am celebrating his 85th birthday.

You too can help him celebrate next Monday, September 26, when his trio play at Bexley's King's Head with two superstar guests: saxophonist Alan Barnes and trumpeter Bruce Adams.

His enthusiasm is undimmed, too. "Is there anything which would make you turn down a gig?" I asked him recently at his Bickley home. "Only if I'm playing golf," came his instant reply, adding after a momentary pause: "And I'll squeeze in both if I can."

In fact, it's Joe Mudele's enthusiasm, musical adaptability and skill as well as his amenable personality which have helped put him in the right place at the right time so many times in his long and illustrious career, be it his close on 40 years for the weekly radio show Sing Something Simple or his phenomenally busy record session work.

Through the 1950s, 60s, 70s and into the 80s he was constantly in demand from the then major record labels, sometimes doing as many as three sessions a day, each at a different studio.

The music was pretty varied, too, he told me: "I could be dashing from a session for a film score, to another playing bass on the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper tracks and then maybe a new Barbra Streisand album."

Sadly, the heyday of recording session work is long over, superceded largely by cost-cutting electronic simulation. But, when truly musical values mattered, Joe Mudele's generation were just what was needed musicians of great musical intelligence as well as skill, who could walk in and play what was needed there and then without wasting studio time.

Joe's lived most of his life in south-east London, making his musical debut as a child in the 1930s at the Downham Tavern with his father's musical-hall stage act. After being demobbed at the end of World War II, the then young bass player landed a nightly dance-band residency in Eltham and became a regular at the Club 11, a fledgling jazz club set-up in Soho by the young bloods of British Be-bop, Ronnie Scott and Johnny Dankworth.

From then on his work brought him many vibrant music memories: sitting in on a late night session with Charlie Parker at the 1949 Paris Jazz Festival, joining the Dankworth Seven, doing a radio show with Frank Sinatra, touring Europe with Hoagy Carmichael ... the list seems endless.

Happy birthday, Joe here's to still more memories.