Guitarist Bobby Broom played his first paying jazz gig at age 16–with saxophonist Sonny Rollins at Carnegie Hall. “Isn’t that sick?” asks Broom, now 40, with a laugh. “Where do you go from there?” He spent the next couple decades trying to figure that out, but he says it wasn’t until the late 90s, at the end of a long stint with New Orleans R & B man Dr. John, that he realized he was “really a jazz musician.”
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Broom, who grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, had picked up the guitar only four years before the Rollins gig, and he was not immediately drawn to jazz. “This guitar teacher I had would try to get me to listen to people like Wes Montgomery,” he says. “I would say, ‘OK,’ but then I’d go home and try to learn Al McKay’s solo on ‘That’s the Way of the World’ by Earth, Wind & Fire.” Eventually, however, Broom was attracted to jazz by the funky records people like Grover Washington and Herbie Hancock were making in the mid-70s, and after a record store clerk recommended George Benson’s Bad Benson, he was hooked.
In 1978 Broom shipped off to Boston’s Berklee College of Music, which was lousy with future young lions, including Branford Marsalis. But Miller had remained in New York, where he was working with trumpeter Tom Browne and keyboardist Dave Grusin, founder of the popular commercial fusion label GRP. Broom went home to join them, and his debut album, Clean Sweep, a slick fusion affair, was released by GRP in 1981. Not long afterward Rollins noticed an ad for the record and called him up. Broom went on to work with the saxophonist for four years.
Although none of the ten tracks is an original, Broom, Carroll, and Hall have made them their own. Jazz versions of the Frankie Valli hit “Can’t Take My Eyes off You” or Simon & Garfunkel’s “El Condor Pasa” might sound dubious on paper, but the trio’s economical, whip-smart treatments give the tunes a new immediacy. Broom has come to see expanding the jazz repertoire as essential to his relevance as well as his sanity–though to his credit, he’s avoided referring to his choices as “new standard,” a term both Herbie Hancock and Joshua Redman have used to market makeovers of shopworn rock songs. “I don’t like the Herbie record, because he’s rewritten the stuff,” says Broom. “I want to play the songs…these are beautiful songs. I’m a jazz musician and I’m trying to find material that’s going to keep me interested in doing this, and it’s not ‘Stella by Starlight.’”
