Daniel Rotem’s new album “Wave Nature” resists easy description. It’s not quite a jazz album, not quite experimental, not quite pure soundcraft, it’s something in between all those. It offers challenging ideas paired with good hooks and catchy phrases, left-turns and guideposts. It’s reminiscent in some ways, maybe mostly in execution, to music like that of the Books, where you hear combinations of sounds and instruments that you would hardly expect to be paired together, musical styles that seem like they should be at odds with each other but that work incredibly well in combination (“Accumulated Shortcomings,” for instance, has a wistful synth line that wouldn’t feel out of place in an adventure RPG videogame, but it’s paired with a sax solo whose tone calls to mind the main theme from Lee Holdridge’s “Mr. Mom” score, and it all sounds beautiful. Or “Savior Complex,” which pairs a Liars circa-“They Were Wrong So We Drowned” beat and background drone with incredibly gorgeous, calligraphic sax playing from Rotem. You just gotta hear it.)
What “Wave Nature” is like, more than anything, is the music you imagine from textual descriptions before you hear the actual music. This is what I mean: when I read Alex Ross’s amazing “The Rest is Noise,” and his descriptions of the music of Webern, Berg, Stravinsky, Sibelius, or Hindemith, I imagined music so powerful and fascinating that it was beyond comprehension—blizzards of notes that were confounding and brain-breaking. And then when I actually listened to the music, I was often—but not always—disappointed by what I found. Rotem’s music is like imaginary music made real—something fanciful that you might idly cook up in your head, but he actually makes it happen.
The first track on the album, “The Inadequacy of Language,” is a good example of this. It starts with a little siren loop, and then a few prefatory exhalations from a group of woodwinds. The track then suddenly shifts: spare percussion and bass enter, and the sax becomes the main voice. Then the chorus of woodwinds returns before the track shifts again. A deep, warning tone from the sax resounds in the background while muted, clattering percussion adds urgency. Rotem’s playing here feels impassioned, declarative, like he’s trying to get his message across before it’s too late.