Plas Johnson keeps melody at his fingertips

Many well-known jazz artists have had at least one hit recording, a number that has exposed them to the wider pop music audience. For Dave Brubeck, it was “Take Five”; Louis Armstrong had “Hello, Dolly” (among others); John Coltrane had “My Favorite Things.” And for Frank Sinatra, “My Way.”

Tenor saxophonist Plas Johnson surely didn’t know, as he entered the studio more than 43 years ago for just another movie-soundtrack session, that he would record the tune forever connected with him: Henry Mancini’s theme music for “The Pink Panther.” The glimmer of recognition that came from that unlikely source didn’t give Johnson the visibility of an Armstrong or a Coltrane, but it did open performance opportunities for an otherwise too-little-recognized, veteran jazz artist.

On Saturday night at Charlie O’s amiable jazz tavern in Valley Glen, Johnson, 75, displayed some of the appealing qualities that jazz maturity can offer. Like many musicians of his generation, he interprets jazz as an art of virtuosity as well as communication. Opening his program with Sonny Rollins’ jaunty line “Doxy,” he applied his warm and furry tone to a set of variations combining fast-fingered ornamentation with driving swing phrases. On an up-tempo romp through the ancient Al Jolson hit “Avalon,” he displayed even quicker reflexes, whipping through horn-scouring arpeggios and fractured fragments of harmonic riffing.

In both the up-tempos and ballads, Johnson never lost track of a tune’s melody, always providing his listeners with connections, melodic and harmonic, to the original, smoothly carrying them along with his musical invention. Duke Ellington’s “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good)” and Willard Robison’s “Old Folks” elicited the dark emotional qualities of his sound. The touching manner in which Johnson brought the songs to life, with the phrasing of a first-rate jazz vocalist, evoked Lester Young’s famous suggestion that jazz artists should never play a ballad without being familiar with its lyrics.

Johnson was ably backed by a first-rate, cross-generational rhythm section: veterans Jon Mayer (piano) and John Heard (bass) and the youthful Lorca Hart (drums). Though the ad hoc band sometimes seemed a bit out of sync (Heard heads the trio that performs at Charlie O’s every weekend with different headliners), by the end it had convincingly come together behind Johnson’s always provocative playing.