The passing of the magnificent Humphrey Lyttelton prompted quite a few references to how great a role his personality played in his career. That all-important human element tends to be underrated now that jazz has been overrun by men in white coats.

Dudley Moore, of course, possessed charisma in abundance - so much so, in fact, that people often forgot that he was an exceptional musician as well as a brilliant entertainer. All credit, then, to James Pearson, leader of Ronnie Scott's house trio, for mounting such an affectionate and quirky celebration of Moore.

Like the subject of this musical portrait, Pearson is an omnivorous improviser blessed with an iron- clad technique. Over the course of a lengthy and unashamedly whimsical set he led his guests through a sequence of buoyant, Erroll Garner-like riffs, slinky blues, a torch ballad or two and, at the close, an ingenious, pit band- style arrangement of Rhapsody in Blue performed by just a sextet, including one of Moore's early employers, Sir John Dankworth.

Having just entered his ninth decade, Sir John is understandably frail now. Nevertheless, he had some genial stories to tell about how he first encountered the young Dud at a May Ball in Oxford where the acts on the bill included a newish combo calling themselves the Rolling Stones. Moore soon afterwards joined Dankworth's band, eventually baling out to team up with Peter Cook and Co in their legendary assault on the Edinburgh Fringe.

Another veteran, the lyricist Fran Landesman, was on hand to hear the bluesy singer Gill Manley deliver Before Love Went Out of Style, an angular ballad co-written by Moore. No one could tire of hearing Landesman's most celebrated song, Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most.

Pearson did not neglect the more vulnerable side of Moore's work, revisiting a finely etched bossa nova, Field Day for Shirley, and - in the company of the sleek violinist Lizzie Bull - charting a gentle course through It's Easy to Say, a Henry Mancini ballad taken from that lubricious hit film 10.

If Moore's final years of illness were unbearably distressing, Pearson dispelled the gloom with one of the little man's wittiest musical routines, a setting of Colonel Bogey inflated to the epic proportions of a Beethoven sonata. The thundering climaxes never ended. Dud would surely have approved.

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