| Jazz |
Rafael Enciso’s Quiet Revolution
On a warm June afternoon in Ithaca, years before he found himself on stages in New York City—Rafael Enciso would often walk the footpaths that wind along the city’s gorges. The water there is in perpetual negotiation with the rocks: pressing, receding, settling, starting again. As a child, Enciso would sit and watch the current fracture the light into fleeting shapes. He didn’t yet have the language for it, but something about that slow dissolution from one form into another imprinted itself on him. Later, as an adult and composer, he would find the metaphor waiting, intact, as if it had been preserved in the water’s memory.
That metaphor eventually became the conceptual core of Crossfade, Enciso’s most ambitious album to date, a recording that navigates the territory where sound dissolves into sound, where memory feeds the present, where transitions hold more emotional truth than arrivals.
The album, in its quiet way, feels like a statement of purpose: a declaration that small shifts matter, that beauty lies in the understated, and that the past never fully recedes, it simply modulates.
A Composer Who Writes in Layers
Enciso belongs to a cohort of young New York composers who treat composition not as a prelude to improvisation but as a vocabulary in its own right. Unlike many bassist-leaders who place their instrument front and center, Enciso resists the gravitational pull of self-display. In Crossfade, his bass is the emotional anchor but never the protagonist; his real voice is in the architecture.
The writing is built in layers: long melodic arcs that move like weather patterns; rhythmic ideas that pulse without locking into rigid grids; harmonies that shimmer between clarity and mild dissonance. There are moments, particularly in the mid-album tracks, where the writing approaches the reflective poise of contemporary classical music, but always with the warmth and flexibility of jazz phrasing.
Enciso’s major strength as a composer is his capacity for restraint. He never crowds the space. He leans on suggestion rather than declaration, allowing each musician to carry the material into territories the written score only hints at. Yet the overall design is unmistakably his: the logic of the transitions, the sensitivity to timbre, the way each section melts into the next without a visible seam.
Crossfade is not an album that announces itself; it unfolds.
The Opening: A Slow Dawn
The album begins with a track that feels like the sonic equivalent of a long exhale. The piano introduces a motif suspended between two tonal centers, almost uncertain of where to land. Miguel Russell’s drumming enters not with force but with intention, brushes grazing across the snare in a gesture closer to breathing than timekeeping.
Then comes Nicola Caminiti’s alto: bright, tensile, slicing through the warm haze of the ensemble like a line of first light over a horizon. His phrasing is deliberate, never chasing virtuosity for its own sake. Caminiti plays the melody as if he were walking a thread between memory and present experience, letting it stretch but never snap.
This opening sets the aesthetic tone of the project: contemplative, lyrically modern, rooted in the craftsmanship of composition but alive with improvisational nuance.
The New York Connection
Since his arrival in New York in 2021, Enciso has been part of a tight-knit circle of musicians who blur the boundaries between jazz, chamber music, and post-modern rhythmic language. Pianist Gabriel Chakarji, whose work blends Venezuelan rhythmic intelligence with New York harmonic breadth, has become one of Enciso’s closest collaborators. Their musical rapport is evident: Chakarji often anticipates harmonic turns with uncanny precision, shaping the contour before Enciso even finishes laying it out.
Drummer Miguel Russell, one of the most articulate percussion voices of his generation, provides a rhythmic clarity that prevents the music from drifting into abstraction. His playing on Crossfade is architectural, never overbuilt, never underdrawn. He sculpts time rather than marking it.
Altoist Nicola Caminiti, who shares with Enciso and Russell both an artistic trajectory and a period of literal cohabitation, provides the emotional lift of the ensemble. His tone is unmistakable: bright but never brash, warm but never soft-focus.
Together, the quartet plays with the ease of a shared language, not one forged only on stage, but in kitchens, practice rooms, late-night debates about harmony, philosophical disagreements about phrasing, and the silent intimacy of living side by side.
You can hear that history in the music.
Dayna Stephens: The Center of Gravity
A great deal of the album’s coherence comes from the presence, both musical and personal, of Dayna Stephens, who produced the project and appears on several tracks. Stephens is a rare figure in contemporary jazz: a saxophonist of profound emotional intelligence, a bandleader who cultivates a tone of quiet authority, and a composer whose sense of space is nearly architectural.
His influence on Crossfade is unmistakable. You can hear it in the phrasing choices, in the pacing of the album, in the decision to favor subtlety over spectacle.
Stephens’s own contributions on saxophone deepen the album’s emotional register. His sound, round, patient, slightly shadowed, contrasts with Caminiti’s brightness, creating a conversation that feels generational as well as musical. The interplay between the two saxophones is one of the album’s most understated pleasures: a dialogue between clarity and haze, light and depth.
One senses that Stephens did more than produce the album; he helped Enciso articulate the version of it that he had long imagined but hadn’t yet fully named.
A Closer Look at the Tracks:
The Title Track: “Crossfade”
The album’s conceptual center emerges in its title track. Built on a shifting rhythmic cell in 7/4 that never fully settles, the composition moves like an organism in transition. Chakarji’s voicings create harmonic vapor, tones that seem to float just above the surface of the rhythm section.
Caminiti’s solo is a study in patience: he begins with near-whispers, stretching long tones before allowing rhythmic motifs to gather strength. His restraint gives the solo its narrative arc.
Enciso’s bass, meanwhile, does not behave like a traditional anchor. He slides in and out of the harmony, offering counter-melodies rather than simply form. His choices reflect the album’s ethos: nothing is fixed; everything is in motion.
The Stampley Effect
Midway through the record, we encounter Jahari Stampley on organ, a presence that alters the energy without disrupting the coherence. Stampley plays with the confidence of an artist whose technique is not the point but the instrument of expression. His lines rise in vertical motion, adding a sense of ascent to the album.
The organ’s timbre thickens the harmonic texture, pushing the ensemble into new territory. It is one of the few moments where the album sounds deliberately expansive.
The Ballad
Every major jazz album has a ballad that crystallizes its emotional thesis. Here, the ballad appears late in the sequence. It is slow, almost motionless, but rich with detail. Chakarji’s piano introduction is a small masterpiece of harmonic implication, voices forming and fading like shifting cloud layers.
Stephens’s entrance on this track carries a weight that only experience provides. His tone is dark, almost dusk-like, and his phrasing feels like someone reflecting aloud rather than performing.
This track alone could justify the album’s place among the significant jazz releases of 2025.
It expands the role of the bassist-composer.
Enciso belongs to the lineage of Dave Holland, Linda May Han Oh, John Patitucci, and Chris Lightcap, not because he imitates them, but because he understands the bass not as accompaniment but as an architectural force.
A Final Arc: The Return to Ithaca
By the time the album reaches its closing track, the metaphor that began in the Ithaca gorges returns, not as a literal reference but as an emotional echo. The music circles back to the idea that nothing truly disappears; it simply dissolves into the next thing.
The final moments of Crossfade feel like standing again by the water Enciso watched as a child. The current moves, reshapes itself, leaves traces, carries others away. One sound fades; another emerges. What remains is not a conclusion but a continuity.
In a year already rich with significant jazz releases, Crossfade stands out for its quiet confidence, its compositional depth, and its refusal to overstate what it knows it can say through nuance.
It is, unmistakably, one of the major jazz albums of 2025, and a compelling marker of who Rafael Enciso is becoming:
– a composer of rare sensitivity,
– a bassist of quiet authority,
– an artist who understands that change, like music, is a matter of transitions.
Fade into the next moment. Begin again.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, November 14th 2025
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Musicians:
Nicola Camintiti, saxophone
Gabriel Charkarji, piano
Miguel Russel, drums
Track Listing:
High Priestess (feat. Miguel Russell)
Photogenic Memory (feat. Gabriel Chakarji)
Austin Otto (feat. Dayna Stephens)
Stick Your Neck Out
Thousand Yard Stare (feat. Jahari Stampley)
Waterfall (feat. Nicola Caminiti)
Solstice
Skipping Stones
Whirlpool
Lennox Avenue