All these years later, saxophonist Charles Owens still vividly recalls his response to hearing If You Leave Me Now as a young boy.

“I was six or seven years old,” he says, “and I was upstairs cleaning. We would always do housework on Saturdays, and we would have every radio in the house on, same station, so we’d be running around the house listening to the same thing whatever room we were in.

“And I remember just hearing this song and breaking down and crying. This song has such a beautiful melody, and has such a feeling of longing, that even when I was a child, it really emotionally affected me.”

Listen to Owens play his saxophone on If You Leave Me Now, out August 19, and it’s clear: that same connection with the music exists to this day. He and his quartet are wholly themselves, offering up a genuine, vulnerable rendition, and inviting listeners of all ages to discover — or perhaps rediscover — this Chicago classic through a jazz idiom.

“This is me going back and exploring repertoire that meant a lot to me my whole life,” says Owens, whose forthcoming LP “Golden Moments,” out this November, is full of such tracks, If You Leave Me Now included. It’s part of his attempt, beyond playing music he loves, to widen the umbrella of jazz, and welcome new listeners in. “I’m definitely a proponent of what a lot of great people in this music have done before, which is to play songs that people are familiar with. ‘Oh what, they’re playing a Chicago tune in a jazz band, what’s going on?’ And have them be drawn into that. And then see that you can improvise and make it sound good and have it be really appealing, and win people over to this music.

“A lot of people have a certain idea of what jazz or what Black American music, improvisatory music is. They think it’s just like, swinging’ cat, daddy-o, this particular thing. And we’re trying to let people know, it’s not that. It can be anything. It can be any song as long as the song is good, and you start out with a strong melody. It’s really about trying to change the perception of what swing or what improvised music is about. And these songs are — people love these songs, and when I say people, I mean me too, like I literally grew up with them, and they have made an imprint on my psyche, and an imprint on my heart. So when I play them, it feels so natural because it’s been in my being for my whole life. And they’ve had this huge effect on me since I was literally a little kid, like close to even being a toddler.”