With the tyrannical lockdown due to COVID, jazz musicians are looking for ways to still be able to record. Pianists and guitarists have it easy, as solo albums are a natural for them. For horn players, it’s a bit more dicey unless you decide to play all of the instruments yourself like Chris Potter recently did. Angeleno tenor saxist Daniel Rotem goes the monastic route, performing an album’s worth of material un accompanied except with his vintage horn.
What comes across is a collection of meditations that are a introspective and pleading. His mouthpiece puffs out reflections on “Looming Skies” and reaches out on the siging “Within The Drops There Is A Lifetime”. He bops through a huffing “United Loneliness” and wheezes into a buzzing echoe on “Autophobia”. Nocturnal colors glisten on “The Steps We Need To Take” and he reaches for heights on the wide ranging “Free Fall”. As music, particularly jazz, is so relation-oriented, you can feel this man viscerally contacting you, trying to break through the social distancing.