Jazz
Relative Pitch Records · 20 February 2026
The record opens with “初雷–hatsurai”, four thirty-six, and the first thing you hear is a thunderclap: Masayo Koketsu rakes the alto from top to bottom and Nava Dunkelman answers with the same force before the phrase is done. The title means “first thunder”, and the scene stands for everything that follows, because that 22 April 2023, at GSI Studios, was the first day the two of them had ever met. Relative Pitch Records says so on its own page, and it is what you hear for forty-six minutes: two players introducing themselves by playing.
“露の玉–tsuyu no tama” runs three thirty-one, and it’s the track where the reference turns explicit: Koketsu fires off splinters of very short notes and Dunkelman replies with bells, which is exactly Rashied Ali’s gesture on “Interstellar Space”. There’s an instant of Albert Ayler in the middle and then they’re off somewhere else. Both names hang over any saxophone-and-drums duo, and here they get quoted to their face instead of dodged.
Eight of the nine titles are Japanese words for weather and water: the frost taking its leave in “別れ霜–wakarejimo”, the bead of melting snow in “雪解雫–yukigeshizuku”, the green rain of “青時雨–aoshigure”. The one that falls outside the series is “言霊–kotodama”, six zero five, the name for the spirit that lives inside words. It’s the only title with nothing to do with meteorology, and the second longest piece here.
The track that carries the whole thing is the last one. “夕霧–yūgiri”, ten zero five, starts with an almost plaintive saxophone over percussion that’s barely there, lets Koketsu’s lines thicken at their own pace, and halfway through Dunkelman takes over and it’s her bringing the thunder. It runs close to a quarter of the album’s forty-six minutes and more than double the average of the other eight. That’s where the problem sits: four of the nine don’t reach four minutes and “雪解雫” stops at two nineteen, and heard in a row they come across as sketches of what “夕霧” finally does properly with the time it needs. There’s also a production gap you can hear: the tape is from April 2023, Weasel Walter mixed and mastered it between July and August 2025, and the record came out last February.
Rating: 7.5/10
Text by Aina Torrents