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, 2020. But Notes of Thanks, tasked by Broom’s longtime trio, bassist Dennis Carroll and drummer Kobie Watkins, is a project imbued with gratitude dedicated to the inimitable Sonny Rollins, an icon Broom played with early in his career.

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

As a 16-year-old Chicago Jazz Studies 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 New York City. While there, Broom came to find out he was actually called up to join Rollins. Rollins did “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 his Decade gig by 1978, which coincidentally was when a Sonny Rollins sideman showed up.

Bobby recalls “Then the story I’ve heard is that Sonny was reading the New York Times and saw an ad for the gig… but the gig is going well.”

Bobby Broom was subsequently a member of Rollins’s band for two five-year stints: 1981–‘87 and 2006–‘10. He played on two studio albums with him, No Problem (1981) and Easy Living (1977), both recorded during both periods he was with the band. He also played on the 2006 studio album Sonny, Please.

In his early days in Rollins’s band, Bobby was “scared, intimidated and in awe” and playing beside this icon gave him an affirmation, a validation. “Musically I was just hoping stuff would rub off.”

The process to selecting songs for this project was also different from his previous albums, as some 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 composition on the album, “Sonnymoon for Two” is a Rollins blues.

“There’s my kind of proclivity to not do obvious things. Some of the things I know from my experience with him, we did ‘The Alfie’s’ quite a bit, ‘Isn’t It Romantic/I Love You Porgy’… Also, coincidence or not, just a couple of years ahead of Branford [Marsalis], David Sanborn hosted back in the mid-1990s,” Broom explains. “Sonny played ‘Kim’ and blew the house down.”

“And ‘Kim’ is also written for [Rollins’s] wife. He sometimes did those songs in her honor, in his career as with the guitar,” Bobby says. “So, I have to consider all those things as well as just the song.”

Bobby also thinks that he was able to write the arrangements while knowing the idiomatic things that Sonny does, and it just worked out that way. “And there were things that I wanted to do, like ‘Paul’s Pal’ and ‘Strode Rode.’”

“‘Strode Rode’, which is a trickier tune… it required a different approach to it,” Broom says, adding, “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 also played the piano intro to his own “Oh, Let the Sun Shine Down,” as well as the introspective title track 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, as opposed to his second five-year stint in the 2000s, Bobby wasn’t in a space at that point to really soak in all the greatness that was being presented to him. He says, “I always talked about until now, in my stories, 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 didn’t realize that was how I sounded like that.”

“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. Bobby adds, “But then I listened to those records, and I remember all those circumstances, and Sonny was one of the men who was in front of me, playing all this music on his horn and getting all of that regal kind of attention. And I was taking all of that in.”