Bobby Broom is no stranger to projects of gratitude to jazz icons (such as Bobby Broom Plays for Monk, 2009, and More Amor: A Tribute to Wes Montgomery with the Chicago Jazz Orchestra, 2025). But Notes of Thanks, backed by Broom’s longtime trio, bassist Dennis Carroll and drummer Kobie Watkins, is a project imbued with gratitude dedicated to the indomitable saxophonist Sonny Rollins, an icon Broom played with early in his career.

Broom spent more time in Rollins’s band than any other guitarist, and while Rollins helped shape him as an artist, the serendipitous gig almost didn’t happen.

As a 16-year-old LaGuardia High School student, Broom sat in on a rehearsal with Rollins, who was impressed enough to ask the teen to join him on tour. Broom replied, “Oh, I can’t. . . I’ve got to graduate high school.”

Rollins understood and replied, “I’m sorry, right. . . Well, okay, I’ll give you a call.”

Decades later and just a few years ago, Broom visited the Sonny Rollins Archive housed at The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York, and was gobsmacked to find a line in one of Rollins’s to-do lists from 1977 that read, “Call Bob Broom.”

The call from Rollins occurred several months after that rehearsal, resulting in a one-off gig at Carnegie Hall.

That could have been the end of the story. A few years later, Broom was working in trumpeter Tom Browne’s band at GRP Records and by 1981, Broom released his debut album, Clean Sweep, on the same label.

Bobby recalls: “Then the story I’ve heard is that Sonny was reading the New York Times and saw an ad for the record that reminded him about me. I don’t know if that’s true or not. It sounds like a good story.”

Bobby Broom was subsequently a member of Rollins’s band for two five-year stints: 1982-87 and 2005-10. He played on two Rollins studio albums, No Problem (1981) and Reel Life (1983), and a variety of live albums recorded during both periods he was with the band. He also played on the 2006 studio album Sonny, Please.

In those early days in Rollins’s band, Bobby was “already enamored with jazz music. Getting to be that close to him was an affirmation, a validation, and then musically I was just hoping stuff would rub off.”

The process to select the songs for this tribute was unique in that Broom didn’t choose any of the songs he originally played on. He also didn’t automatically select evergreen Rollins standards like “Oleo” or “St. Thomas.” “Doxy,” perhaps the best-known selection, is imagined here as percolating, energetic neo-bop.

“There’s my kind of proclivity to not do obvious things. Some of the things I know from my experience with him, we did play ‘Allison’ quite a bit. ‘Kim’ I know from the iconic performance on Night Music, an NBC program that saxophonist David Sanborn hosted back in the mid-1990s. Broom explains, “Sonny played ‘Kim’ and blew the house down.”

Translating music written for saxophone to the guitar posed its own challenges. “Some music just doesn’t work with the guitar,” Bobby says, or work with the sound of the group. So, I have to consider all those things as well as just the song.”

Bobby also thinks it’s interesting to note that “the last three songs are from the same period in the late ’50s, and it just worked out that way. And there were things that I wanted to do, like ‘Paul’s Pal’ and ‘Strode Road.'”

“Paul’s Pal” is presented in an effervescent calypso style, a choice that came about organically. Bobby explains, “I don’t remember saying to Kobie, ‘Play this beat.’ I think he just started playing it, and it was like, ‘Yeah, that makes sense.'” Kobie Watkins, who also played with Sonny (in his last band), has a keen sense of feel that complements the compositions, Broom’s excursions, and the trio’s interactions.

“Alfie’s Theme” I think is quite a different feeling,” he adds, “but it doesn’t stray too far [from the original].”

Perhaps as a consequence of Broom’s youth during his first five years with Rollins, Bobby wasn’t aware of the breadth and depth of Sonny’s earlier catalog as he is today. “I didn’t know about Live at the Village Vanguard until I was in my thirties. I was on the road with Dr. John and stumbled into a CD shop and saw that record.” Upon first listen, Broom exclaimed, “Oh my God, I don’t believe that I haven’t known about this.”

“I wasn’t looking for those records back then,” he admits now. “I was looking for his latest records,” so he could understand what Rollins was doing at present. Adding, “That just made absolute sense to me. I wasn’t in awe of him in a historical kind of way. [I was] more in awe of the man who was in front of me, playing all this music on his horn and getting all of that regal kind of adoration. And I was taking all of that in.”


Notes of Thanks liner notes, by Ayana Contreras