Plas Johnson, The Pink Panther and Me…

My dad got me started, but I'm mostly self taught. I was playing mostly by ear. You have to have your idols, your heroes. You listen to what they play, pick up the licks you like. Adapting, I guess copying is a better word, the great solos and using what you can. It's the way you put it together that becomes your style. Your notes are your words. It's very boring if you use the same adjectives over and over again. So you have to listen to more than one source. The toughest part of playing jazz is sound and articulation - breaking down your sentences into melody and harmony.
Plas Johnson
Grease: that essence which each jazz musician applies to the music, allowing it to slide around and between the notes and rhythms, imparting elements of spontaneity, emotion and personality which defy written notation.
Plas Johnson, L.A. '55 liner notes

***This Must Be The Plas! (1959) signed by Plas***

Through the years, Erin and I have been to thousands of shows seeing music encompassing all genres in every conceivable venue: Jerry Jeff Walker in a dance hall in Luckenbach, Texas, Ray Charles and his big band (including The Raelettes!) rocking a Neiman Marcus store in a shopping mall in Washington, DC, Jimmy McGriff playing jazz at our wedding in our backyard, Willie Nelson performing a full set at a Tower Records store in New York City, Eric Clapton at Carnegie Hall, Beirut at the Guggenheim Museum (designed by architect eminence grise Frank Lloyd Wright) and James Brown performing in a tent at a store opening in Westport, Connecticut. Equally fabulous and uncommon was a free Plas Johnson gig in the lobby of the Westin Los Angeles Airport Hotel. LAX never sounded so groovy and greasy.

Best known for his studio work, Plas Johnson and his tenor saxophone have graced the recordings of The Beach Boys, Bobby Darin, Marvin Gaye, B.B. King, Liza Minnelli, Linda Ronstadt, Boz Scaggs, Frank Sinatra, Rod Stewart, and Tom Waits, a cast as wide as it is talented. Plas was also a member of the famed Wrecking Crew, a stable of extraordinarily talented Los Angeles based musicians who were featured on thousands of recordings. Bassist Carol Kaye, drummer Hal Blaine and guitarist Glen Campbell were just a few of Plas’ celebrated studio compadres.

Plas was also the tenor saxophonist on Henry Mancini’s ubiquitous hit “The Pink Panther Theme.” Plas remembered, "We only did two takes, I think. When we finished, everyone applauded, even the string players. And that's saying something, they never applaud for anything." The string players weren't the only one's applauding, "The Pink Panther Theme" captured the hearts and ears of millions of fans and became a beloved song which resonated throughout the nine subsequent Pink Panther movies (and cartoons!) in this enduring franchise. A tremendous commercial success, the soundtrack won three Grammys in 1963 and was nominated for an Academy Award, but lost to Mary Poppins, a worthy competitor. The composer Henry Mancini recalled, "I had a specific saxophone player in mind - Plas Johnson. I nearly always precast my players and write for them and around them. Plas had the sound and the style I wanted." To be sure, the mellifluous sound of Plas Johnson was a fitting muse.

It all started in Donaldson, Louisiana, sixty miles north of New Orleans, where Plas grew up in a very musical family. Plas was named after his dad, an abbreviation of plaisant, French for pleasant and delightful, an appropriate and apt sobriquet. His father and mother were musicians and included their children in their family enterprise, “My mother, Grace, played piano and sang. My dad, Plas Sr., played alto sax. They hustled work everywhere we lived. We would travel up and down the bayou on weekends. They would play wherever they could, in bars and restaurants, dances. We all were singers.” That changed when his father brought home a soprano saxophone, “It was a straight soprano. My dad paid $16 for it, he got it from a pawnshop. It doesn't sound like much, but $16 was a whole lot of money back then." For the princely sum of $16, a career was launched which still resonates throughout the film, jazz and television worlds today!

Plas and his brother Ray, a pianist, recorded in the late 1940s as the Johnson Brothers Combo for Regal, a small label in New Orleans. Plas then joined the great blues and jazz singer Charles Brown in 1951 and toured with Charles until he was conscripted into the US Army. Upon his release in 1954, Plas decamped to Los Angeles where he studied at the Westlake School of Music, one of the first academic institutions to offer a college diploma for a Jazz curriculum. Though Westlake was only viable from 1945 through 1961 before closing, it did help other notable Jazz artists, including Bob Cooper, Charlie Haden, and Gary Peacock.

The versatility of Plas was invaluable as he became an in-demand session player in the fertile Los Angeles music and studio scene. Fluent on alto, baritone and soprano saxophone, as well as clarinet and flute, Plas considered his tenor saxophone the most important, "I started playing tenor when I was about fifteen. I call it my money horn. No matter how great you play alto, there's always more calls for tenor." And Plas got lots of calls, especially after the resounding success of “The Pink Panther Theme.”

***L.A. ‘55 (1983) signed by Plas, Art Hillery***

Dave Cavanaugh, a legendary Capitol Records A&R executive, signed Plas to a contract immediately after hearing Plas perform on some early Johnny Otis sessions. This led to some obscure recordings - a series of Arthur Murray dance records (credited to "Big Dave Cavanaugh") and jams with lounge exotica master Les Baxter on African Jazz and Tamboo! Plas also added his deft and smooth sax fills for singers Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee and Frank Sinatra. Plas remembered the exacting perfectionist that was Sinatra, "I sat in the hall for two hours and then Dave Cavanaugh brought me in to sit with the band. I played something like an eight-bar solo and that was it." All this acclaimed session work led to other opportunities in television, including a twelve-year stint on the Merv Griffin Show with Merv’s orchestra. Even the great Neal Hefti, a jazz composer of renown for his work with Count Basie, enlisted Plas and the redoubtable trumpet of Harry "Sweets" Edison to perform the theme for the hit television show The Odd Couple. Who knew that Felix and Oscar were hipsters and had such great taste?!

So it was a complete surprise when I was in Los Angeles on a business trip in March 2006 and scoured the LA Times entertainment section and saw that Plas Johnson was playing a gig at the Westin Los Angeles Airport Hotel for free. No cover, no minimum. Billed as "Jazz in the Lobby," it was a series of concerts in an unlikely venue. The hustle and bustle of a transient airport hotel lobby was surprisingly an hospitable host for an incomparable jazz master, no matter the cavernous lobby, challenging acoustics and sterile industrial furnishings. And Plas had some help, the great pianist Art Hillery was sitting in.

There was no stage, just a piano, drum kit, acoustic bass, saxophone and ferns. Lots and lots of ferns. I sat down at an empty table far from the madding shrubbery and an elderly woman asked if she could join me. 'Of course,' I said to the woman who was dressed in her elegant Sunday finery, as she sat down with her doting husband and friend. A few minutes later, the show started. Plas opened with a languid and dripping with molasses "Please Send Me Someone To Love." As Plas began his smoldering and sensuous groove, the woman shouted out, "Mmm, mmm, mmm, take your time!" It was a plea, a petition, and a prayer which Plas willingly answered as he played a wonderfully slow take on the Percy Mayfield classic. Other highlights were "Georgia On My Mind," from the pen of Hoagy Carmichael, a Ray Brown original "Parking Lot Blues" and, of course, "The Pink Panther Theme," a crowd pleasing finale. Despite the roomy and reverberant lobby, Plas imbued so much warmth and sound with his horn, it felt as if we were in an intimate, hazy nightclub. It was an amazing night of music.

After the show, I visited with Plas and exhorted him to come back east to perform in New York. "Oh, I don't travel much these days," he said with a shrug and a smile. He was happy to sign his records, and I thanked him for his music and his time. As he once said about his extensive recording studio work, "My solos always seemed to bring up the record another notch. I could do that in eight bars, I could do that in twelve bars, and I was used to maybe do fills behind the vocalist after that." Yes, Plas Johnson always brought the songs up a notch, just listen to his contributions on Marvin Gaye's Let's Get It On or Boz Scaggs' Silk Degrees or Sam Cooke's Twistin' The Night Away or Joni Mitchell's Travelogue or The Platters' The Great Pretender or Tom Waits' Heart Attack & Vine or...

With Plas, the possibilities are as endless as they are rewarding!