Kurena Ishikawa (石川紅奈) sings the melody while she plays the bass line underneath it, on an upright bass, and she came to that idea by a route that began with a Motown habit rather than a jazz one. Born in Saitama Prefecture, she grew up with parents who loved music and fell for Stevie Wonder and the Jackson 5 in upper elementary school. Her father lent her an electric Stingray bass, and she taught herself by ear, playing along with Stevie Wonder CDs.

She went to an ordinary high school rather than a music school and joined its jazz band club, where she was first handed a double bass in her first year when her advisor suggested the switch. He also lent her a Kenny Drew Trio CD, and she worked up "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To" with the playing of Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen in her ears. In her third year, at an open-campus day for the jazz program of Kunitachi College of Music, she played in a clinic led by Makoto Ozone and got his autograph. That night he sent her a message on social media. She wrote back to ask whether it was really him.

She entered the Kunitachi jazz program, where Ozone teaches, and studied bass with Yosuke Inoue and Ken Kaneko. A class taught by Atsushi Ikeda gave her the idea of singing the melody over her own bass line, and she began ending sets with bass-and-vocal encores. After graduating she took singing lessons with Mio Takashima at bf Jazz School, which Kaneko runs. Ozone brought her into From OZONE till Dawn, the project he leads to give emerging jazz musicians stage time, and in 2021 she played and sang Michael Jackson's "Off The Wall" on bass at Cotton Club Marunouchi in Tokyo, in a video that has since passed 2.5 million views on YouTube.

In 2022 she formed soraya, a pop duo, with pianist Kento Tsubosaka. The duo reached No. 6 on J-WAVE's TOKYO HOT 100 and played the Fuji Rock Festival in 2024. When her own debut was planned, she and Ozone agreed to keep it clearly apart from soraya and to put the bass and the jazz first.

Kurena came out on 22 March 2023 on Verve, with Ozone producing. It has six tracks, three of her own compositions ("Sea Wasp," "Olea," "No One Knows") and three covers: Chick Corea's "500 Miles High," Stevie Wonder's "Bird of Beauty," sung in English and Portuguese, and the "Off The Wall" that had made her name. Ozone plays piano on two tracks and pianist Takeshi Ohbayashi plays on the rest; Kazuhiro Odagiri is on drums, Taka Nawashiro on guitar and Kan on percussion. The cover is a Polaroid portrait of her by the photographer Yuji Watanabe. Her release concert at Cotton Club Marunouchi in June 2023 sold out.

Work outside her own records followed. In 2024 she sang and played double bass on a new version of "Ano Subarashii Ai o Mo Ichido" for The Works Of Tonoban, the Universal soundtrack collection for the documentary on Kazuhiko Kato, alongside Hiroshi Takano, and in November that year she played acoustic bass on "Serendipity" on Tomoyo Harada's Verve mini-album Karin, a record soraya produced. In September 2025 she wrote the liner notes for Japanese reissues of three Bill Evans albums: Interplay, You Must Believe in Spring and At Shelly's Manne-Hole. She played solo concerts in Hong Kong and mainland China that year, and in 2026 she appeared in Taiwan and Hong Kong with soraya.

Garden, her first self-produced album, followed on Verve and reached streaming services on 16 September 2026. It has eight tracks, built mostly from songs she had been performing live, with the musicians she plays with on stage, including Ohbayashi, Nawashiro, the drummer Gene Jackson and Kan. A vinyl edition (Verve UCJJ-9062) is listed for 5 December.

Ishikawa's central device is the doubled line: she sings the tune and the bass part together, in unison or in close company, so that the voice is not an add-on to the rhythm section but part of it. Mikiki's review of Garden sets her beside Esperanza Spalding for the same reason, a singer whose instrument is an upright bass, and notes that Ishikawa has named Spalding as an influence.

Her roots are in soul, Motown and Brazilian music more than in the bebop canon. She names Stevie Wonder and the Jackson 5 as her first loves, the Japanese band Tokyo Jihen and its bassist Seiji Kameda as a favourite, and the electric bassists Jaco Pastorius and James Jamerson as influences on her playing. The jazz tradition arrived through her high school advisor's records, Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen among them, and through Ozone's mentoring.

Kurena is a compact, piano-led jazz record with a Brazilian streak and a Motown cover in the middle of it. Garden moves further toward 1970s soul, soul jazz and Brazilian music: it includes her reading of Minnie Riperton's "Les Fleurs," a version of Roy Ayers's "Searching," a Chick Corea cover in "Time's Lie," and an original, "Witch of the North," with a Latin rhythm.

Her second identity is pop. soraya, her duo with Tsubosaka, is a pop unit rather than a jazz one, and she has kept that work separate from the records released under her own name, all of which are jazz.