i think a lot depends more on your attitude than your age. if you think old, you will act old. if all you can report is how it was back in the good old days, no one wants to hear it.

are you current in ways other than your age? or are you stuck back in the day when you were young?

do you think there is no good music anymore? is your idea of great, maybe, elvis, beatles, stones? not that they were not great, but there have been many more since them with mega talent.

do what you can to live in the now, not the yesterday, and your age as a musician may matter less than you think.

 
There have been great posts here with good remarks and suggestions, many thanks for them.
As for music, I've got no doubts, age really doesn't count. But as regards offstage issues, friendship, etc. I still have the suspicion that people with too much age difference can't get along so well as e.g. those who were mates in the same school.
If we put music totally aside, has any of you got any experience of age problems between people that are together for one or another reason?

Well, I don't typically hang around with people my kids age so the only age difference problems I've experience are
1) with my kids - nothing unusual but it is funny when I hear from my kid that I'm old fashion - hey I still feel like a cool, progressive 25 year old.   25 was quite a while ago

2) at church - our church (about 700 people) has several generations of folks which is great but you can't avoid running into "issues" periodically when there are so many different "perspectives".  Issues range from musical preference, to trying to keep kids from trampling the seniors at the donut line, political points of view, etc.  

When I was asked to join the band I'm now in, the young background vocalist told me that she was surprised at hearing an "older" guy play well.  That was awkward but we laughed it off and have a great relationship.  

Yeah, that's it, exactly, I feel and do the same with my present band. And now, that I'm offered to join another band with the same age conditions, I just started to think about all this.
 

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest age is not always the best indicator of maturity.

I work at a television station that produces a midday show that often includes live music. We shoot the music in the early in the morning so we can merely cut to top of the best possible performance when the show goes live.

Last month we booked an older group (late 20s, early 30s) and told them to show up at 7 am during the weekday for one hour of set-up and sound check and one hour of shoot. The four of them straggled in between 7:15 and 8. We shot one song instead of two and told them they would never play on our show again.

More recently we had a group made up of a high school senior and his friends, all of them college freshmen. They play every Friday night at a club, but all over them managed to make it to our studios *early* for a 6 am Saturday shoot for a Monday show. They had spent the week perfecting their two songs to time (3 minutes each) so we actually shot a 3rd song they could add to their myspace page for free. They were still out of there before 8 am. One-take wonders.

It's always about personality and chemistry. Age really isn't a huge factor. Age can definitely play a role in the personality and chemistry -- just having different life or career agendas can impact that dramatically -- but age by itself is not something you should be very concerned about.

Go and play with them, work on your own professionalism, and see what happens.

I think a lot the majority of it is down to professionalism.

Good question - quite what I meant to ask when starting the thread, worded in a different, maybe more expressive way.
My true self is rather with people of my age, but playing music with these "youngsters" is in fact a great experience. Who is comfortable with what? That ain't easy.

I understand this sentence, still I wonder what you mean to say... Any more down-to-earth consequences??