Last Saturday, a capacity crowd packed the Paradise to witness the sounds of St. Germain — which is the nom de techno of Ludovic Navarre, a French electronic producer known for his jazz- and blues-inflected music. At the Paradise, however, St. Germain featured Navarre (“playing” a computer) plus a sextet of French jazz musicians. Together, the seven-man crew re-created most of his latest album, Tourist, which has become a sleeper hit for the respected jazz label Blue Note.

Although Tourist is an eminently pleasing album, St. Germain proved more intriguing as a live project, bringing some visual excitement and group improvisation to the world of DJ music and a little dance-floor bacchanalia to the realm of jazz. The music itself was not particularly original; much of it sounded like an update of ’60s boogaloo, soul jazz, and salsa refitted with contemporary rhythmic touches — house, dub, and trip-hop. It’s a simple idea, and it works. Starting with a loping jazz-funk number, St. Germain ripped through 90 minutes of music that married electronica’s taste for subsonic bass tones and rigid rhythmic grids with a looser jazz sensibility and playful improvisational interplay.

Highlights included not one but two takes on “Rose Rouge,” a track that mixes a sampled Marlena Shaw exhortation (“I want you to get together”), a hard-driving swing groove, and the burnished thump of house music. The guitarist’s long bebop runs and gritty blues bends made the dub reggae of “Montego Bay Spleen” and the plush trip-hop of “Sure Thing” sparkle. But in general, the uptempo cuts (“So Flute” and “Latin Note”) fared best — the driving house grooves allowed the percussionists a chance to engage in a dialogue of rippling timbale patters and tart conga flurries.

Watching over the sweaty and smiling scene with dark, sunken eyes, Navarre looked as if he’d rather be at home reading Le monde. Unshaven, dour, and pale-faced, he was a portrait of the bedroom auteur: he twisted knobs, moved faders, and pressed buttons with the seriousness of an air-traffic controller. Despite his negligible stage presence, the control-board fiddling had an indelible effect on the flow of the music. His careful manipulation of the pre-programmed beats brought the dance floor to numerous climaxes, enlivened tracks that threatened to drag, and maneuvered gentle segues, guaranteeing that the dancing would never relent.