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Bobby Broom

Guitarist Bobby Broom has always embraced the rhythm and blues core of jazz music.

About Me

Guitar great Bobby Broom knows exactly when he first fell in love with the jazz organ. The magic moment came at age 10 when he put on one of the albums his father had brought home, Charles Earland’s Black Talk! Young Bobby didn’t know or care much about jazz yet. “I was just into music,” he says. But after playing the “Mighty Burner”’s now classic 1969 album, he was sold.

“Something about that record captivated me from the start, the feeling, it was just like that,” says Broom. “It had ‘The Age of Aquarius’ and ‘More Today Than Yesterday,’ songs I knew from the radio. It made me happy. It made me want to dance. And it made me want to listen. I played that album every day, multiple times a day. It completely enthralled me.” When Earland moved to Chicago in the late ’80s for a successful comeback, there was no doubt in Broom’s mind who his guitarist had to be. “I thought, this is my gig, obviously, this is my gig,” says the guitarist, laughing. “There’s no way he moves to Chicago and I’m here and I’m not going to play with him! It was the thing doing its thing!”

As documented on Earland albums including Front Burner and Third Degree Burn, the dream gig became a reality, and Broom went on to play and/or record with other Hammond B-3 masters including Jimmy McGriff, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Melvin Rhyne and, once, the king of them all, Jimmy Smith. But he has made his strongest mark in this vein with his own organ groups—first the Deep Blue Organ Trio, a Chicago collective featuring Chris Foreman that lasted 25 years, and its ongoing successor, the Bobby Broom Organi-Sation, featuring B-3 whiz Ben Paterson.

On the Organi-Sation’s terrific new live album, Jamalot, Broom flashes back as ever to Earland’s treatment of pop hits to reach a wider audience. Half of the album, recorded during his trio’s 2014 tour with Steely Dan, consists of tunes that the legendary pop band’s followers would be familiar with, including Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition,” the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun,” the Beatles’ “The Long and Winding Road,” and Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla”—all of which he had previously recorded.

The other songs on Jamalot, recorded in 2019 at Joe and Wayne Segal’s Jazz Showcase in Chicago, address earlier eras of the popular song movement via “Tennessee Waltz,” Fats Waller’s “Jitterbug Waltz,” Kurt Weill’s “Speak Low,” and Tadd Dameron’s “Tadd’s Delight.” Different audiences with different expectations but connected by a love of classic melodies.

Broom, who had previously opened for Steely Dan with the Deep Blue Organ Trio, initially turned down the invitation to tour with them again. Following the dissolution of the DBOT, he was between organ groups and was uncomfortable with “wrangling” a Hammond player he didn’t know musically or personally.

Told of his decision, one of his regular drummers, Makaya McCraven, now a mega-force in contemporary music, got in his ear. “He said, ‘What? What? What are you doing? You can’t not do this, man,’” Broom says with a laugh. Who turns down an opportunity to go on the road with legends? With McCraven’s help, Broom spun through their lists looking for a worthy candidate.

When Paterson’s name came up, it stuck. Broom had never worked with the Philadelphia native, but he had heard him a few times (Paterson was a longtime regular in Chicago tenor great Von Freeman’s band) and liked what he heard. As he had done in drafting keyboardist Justin Dillard for his 2022 album, Keyed Up, the guitarist went with his hunch. The timing was perfect. Paterson, who had moved to New York, was returning to the Windy City for a gig and would be able to rehearse with the new trio. McCraven and Kobie Watkins, a longtime musical partner of Broom’s, would alternate on drums (depending on the needs of their pregnant wives).

“Ben was a perfect fit for me, exactly what I was looking for in a new organ trio, which was freedom,” says Broom. “He has a background in jazz organ tradition, but his sensibility also leans toward pop music, popular song, from past eras, the Great American Songbook as well as rhythm and blues and soul music. His melodic sense is really personal. As much as I love the blues, I don’t want to just hear someone play blues and that’s it. Ben plays melodies.”

“Performing with Bobby is always an exciting proposition,” says Paterson. “He always puts his whole self fully behind every tune and every note. He never dials it in or simply plays something. Sitting between Bobby’s lead and Kobie or Makaya’s incredible groove, at the heart of the band, is one of my absolute favorite places to be.”

Bobby Broom was born in Harlem, New York, on January 18, 1961, and raised on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. He had what he calls “intimate relationships” with the tunes that came on his radio. “When my favorite songs came on, they were like friends knocking on my door,” he says. He aspired to one day play some of those great songs, but not until he was ready.

He began studying the guitar at age 12, concentrating on jazz under the aegis of Harlem-based guitar instructor Jimmy Carter. A 16-year-old prodigy at the High School of Music and Art (now known as the LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts), Broom played in the jazz ensemble and was awarded for Outstanding Jazz Improvisation during his senior year.

Chaperoned by Weldon Irvine (an early mentor of his, composer for Freddie Hubbard and Horace Silver, bandleader for Nina Simone, and lyricist of “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”), the 16-year-old Broom found himself in an East Side NYC jazz club for the purpose of being taught to sit in. That lesson became a reality for Broom when Al Haig, pianist for Charlie Parker, invited him to join in for a couple of tunes. Impressed by the youngster’s playing, Haig offered him the chance to play with him at Gregory’s on the Upper East Side whenever he wanted. Broom ended up playing two or three times a week there, and also got to play, with great awe, with another notable Bird keyboardist, Walter Bishop, Jr.

Broom was soon pursued by an even greater jazz legend, Sonny Rollins, whose guitarist at the time, Aurell Ray, saw Broom play in Irvine’s musical, Young, Gifted and Broke, in Brooklyn, and arranged to have him meet Rollins. After playing with the tenor colossus at a rehearsal, Broom was asked to go on the road with him. Still in high school, Broom (and his parents) declined.

But in 1977, Rollins invited Broom to perform with him at a Carnegie Hall concert, initiating a long musical relationship between them. Four years later, Broom began a six-year stint as a member of Rollins’s band, to which he would return in later years, appearing on Rollins albums including No Problem, Reel Life, Sonny Please, and three volumes of the live Road Shows series. “Bobby is one of my favorite musicians,” says Rollins. “He explains why I like the guitar. He’s got a strong musical sixth sense. That makes a lot of explanations and directions unnecessary.”

Broom’s first two albums were Clean Sweep (1981) and Livin’ for the Beat (1984), pre-smooth jazz efforts that transcended the limitations (and sometimes harsh criticism) of that category. In 1984, for personal reasons, he uprooted himself from New York and moved to the Windy City. There, while maintaining ties with New York groups including Kenny Burrell’s Jazz Guitar Band, followed by a jaunt with Miles Davis’s group, then enjoying a rewarding six-year stint with Dr. John (“For me, that was a lesson in the origins of rock and roll”), and hooking up with Windy City–based artists such as Charles Earland, Ron Blake, and Eric Alexander, he set out to establish himself as an important artist in his own right.

“I had agents tell me that I wasn’t a leader, to basically just accept the role of a sideman,” says Broom. Determined to prove them wrong, he recorded two strong mainstream albums under his name for Criss Cross, No Hype Blues (1995, with pianist Ron Perrillo) and Waitin’ and Waitin’ (1997, with Ron Blake).

Beginning with Stand! (2001), he brought a serious improvisational jazz sensibility to pop classics such as Sly and the Family Stone’s title song, the Mamas and the Papas’ “Monday, Monday,” and Jimmy Webb’s “Wichita Lineman.” “I wanted to do what jazz musicians have been doing since its beginning, play songs from my youth that held deep meaning for me,” Broom says.

Modern Man, a blowing session with Dr. Lonnie Smith and Ronnie Cuber released at around the same time, included inspired interpretations of “Superstition” and “Layla”—a song that has been very good to him. While with Dr. John at a TV taping, he witnessed head Domino Eric Clapton himself go wild over Broom's cassette demo of “Layla”—one of those tunes Broom aspired to play as a kid. Says Broom, “He was yelling, ‘Oh my God, man! Oh my God! I can’t believe this is my song!’”

On the live The Way I Play, a set of classic jazz standards from 2008, Broom documented his weekly gig with his trio at the now-legendary Pete Miller’s steakhouse, which ran for more than a dozen years. He then spun his creative wheel again, and again, and again—first “connecting with my musical heritage” with Bobby Broom Plays for Monk, an acclaimed collection of songs by and associated with Thelonious Monk featuring “small gems of musical discovery” (Downbeat); then creating “an ode to where I’m from” on Upper West Side Story, his first collection of originals; and then returning to standards on the lovely My Shining Hour.

His albums with the Deep Blue Organ Trio, featuring organist Chris Foreman, included the Stevie Wonder salute, Wonderful! The Organi-Sation made its recorded debut in 2018 with Soul Fingers, which included Curtis Mayfield’s “Get Ready” and the Beatles’ “Come Together.”

Of all his achievements, Broom is prouder of none more than his appointment as a tenured Associate Professor of Jazz Guitar and Jazz Studies at Northern Illinois University. Awarded a B.A. in music from Columbia College and an M.A. in jazz pedagogy from Northwestern University, he has long been involved in music education, previously teaching at the University of Hartford’s Hartt School of Music, DePaul University, Roosevelt University, and the American Conservatory of Music. He also has instructed music students in public high schools throughout Chicago as part of a jazz mentoring program sponsored by the Ravinia Festival Organization and has been an instructor and mentor with the Herbie Hancock Institute.

“I had to let the dust settle on these Steely Dan tour recordings but after ten years, the power and excitement of them, and the connectedness of this group is something that I want to share with my audience. I’m eager for them to compare and contrast the concert and club stage performances for similarities and differences, feel the depth of the grooves, dance, hum along, and essentially come on the road with us for the hour of this music.” •

My Jazz Story

My first encounter with jazz music came at around age 10. My father came home from the barber shop with a stack of LP record albums, one of which was organist Charles Earland's, "Black Talk." I was immediately drawn to the afroed, sepia figure on the cover, and when I turned it over and saw some familiar pop tune titles on the back, I dashed the record to my room and onto the turntable of my little stereo set. What I heard blew me away! I knew the songs, the melodies, but there was no singing, just instruments playing. Specifically, Earland's robust organ churned out authoritative statements of familiar melodies but then went a step further, playing his own... and oh so soulfully. I didn't know this was jazz, I just knew I liked it. And what a cosmic circle it was that unbeknownst to me at that time, I'd be performing and recording with Charlie some 20 years later! My advice to new listeners of my music, or any jazz for that matter, is to try to find songs in my body of work that are familiar to you. I've recorded everything – from Tin Pan Alley/American Songbook material, pop, classic-rock, funk, and R&B hits from the 1960s and '70, and jazz classics, to originals, There's something for everyone, provided they like soulful, lyrical, jazz guitar. There's a strong emphasis on the melodies, and the improvisations are deep, so there's a lot to process. But the beat and feelings are captivating, so it's a fun ride!