Sungjae Son, Yulhee Kim, Suwuk Chung, Soojin Suh

Near East Quartet is the ECM debut of the Korean group founded by saxophonist and clarinettist Sungjae Son. Since 2010 the band has set elements of contemporary jazz against traditional Korean music and open sound exploration, aiming at new forms rather than a blend of styles. The album places five compositions by Son beside three Korean traditional pieces, and it brings gugak, the traditional music of Korea, into an improvising context the label had rarely explored.

Son, on tenor saxophone and bass clarinet, and guitarist Suwuk Chung have been in the group from the outset. The two met while studying in Boston, Son at Berklee and Chung at the New England Conservatory. The line-up grew with Yulhee Kim, a pansori singer who also plays percussion, and the drummer Soojin Suh, while Sori Choi adds traditional Korean percussion on Baram. The music was recorded in December 2016 at Stradeum Studio in Seoul and mixed at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines by Nicolas Baillard, Manfred Eicher and the producer, Sun Chung.

The pieces are short, between three and seven minutes, and the sound is sparse. On the traditional Mot the voices take on an almost liturgical tone, carried by singing bowls and soft percussion. Pa:do, another traditional song, sets Kim's quiet singing against Son's breathy tenor and a trudging, fuzz-toned guitar. Son's own Jinyang opens with a delicate descending guitar figure, drifts through ghostly vocal effects and settles into a jazz groove driven by Suh's drums. Throughout, Kim's voice moves between speech and song, as in the narrative tradition she comes from.

Reviewers tended to stress how unusual the combination is. In DownBeat, Philip Freeman found that the traditional and original pieces are blended so closely that it becomes impossible to tell them apart. Mark Sullivan of All About Jazz heard "a unique blend of traditional Korean music with contemporary jazz: one which becomes more enthralling with each listen." Songlines (2019) compared Son's tone and melodic approach with Andy Sheppard, while Tyran Grillo of ECM Reviews linked the record to Then Comes the White Tiger, an earlier Korean project on ECM. Geoff Andrew heard the spacey, distorted guitar and saxophone recalling Terje Rypdal, with music that is "generally sparser, more minimalist."

This is the CD edition, ECM 2568, first released on 31 August 2018.