Concert review
Sun-Mi Hong Quintet
Club Nine (TivoliVredenburg)
March 30, 2025
Text: Storm Bakker
Photos: ProgJazz & Myrle Kloens
Sun-Mi Hong is a captivating and enchanting live artist on many levels. In fact, the Amsterdam-based Korean drummer is a rising star known for her boundless creativity and infectious energy, for whom our ‘kikkerlandje’ is becoming too small. On the one hand, this is because the real Dutch jazz clubs, media, and festivals are threatened with extinction. Sun-Mi performs so often at the BIMhuis Amsterdam, with various projects, as a sidekick and as a leader, that you would think she lives at the location. On the other hand, it is simply because Sun-Mi is an outstanding artist, leader, and composer, deserving wider recognition abroad. Sun-Mi is currently one of the best players of acoustic jazz, without a doubt on the verge of an international breakthrough. Downbeat already marked her as ‘an inventive drummer and ‘strikingly original composer’. Recently she performed in Poland with ‘pianista’ Kasia Pietrzko, another young heroine of progjazz. This month she toured in the UK and the Netherlands; next month she will play in Germany, Kassel, Munich, and Dortmund.
Sun-Mi’s current tour is all about the release of her newest album ‘Page 4: Meaning of a Nest’. The material contains eight new works from her hand, crafted as a series of emotional vignettes, piece by piece in the same style as her albums before, merging post-bop jazz and impressionism, with elements of serial and odd meter music. All voices (drums, piano, double bass, tenor saxophone, and trumpet) are seemingly minding their own business, but surprisingly come and ring together at several stages of the music, sometimes even in other dimensions, only to disintegrate again, seeking either solace or solitude. Everything happens slowly and organically, by subtle abstract layering, never sudden or in your face. Each work seems to evolve from nothing, leading into a dream world, full of melancholy atmospheres. Together they set up a big spectrum, in which the post-bop character of the sax and trumpet is muffled by Ravel’s harmonies on piano. On drums, Sun-Mi plays in a pointillistic style, as if she is sketching the music, occasionally surprising the audience with little well-tempered outbursts. It’s her who is behind the parallax scrolling.

The Sun-Mi Hong Quintet has existed since 2018 (*in the beginning with Young-Woo Lee on piano) and by playing, rehearsing and studying, also living together, the five talented musicians perform extremely tight and together. Amsterdam-based Korean Chaerin Im turns out to be the perfect, versatile and delicate pianist Sun-Mi was looking for. The five musicians stay in perfect musical balance, while keeping an individually recognizable sound. All players master the art of taking the listener along in a story, saying more with fewer words. In particular, Italian Nicolò Ricci and Scottish Alistair Payne both seem fully in control, during their epic contemporary improv within hidden structures. Sun-Mi is leading her quintet to play as a unit, with different voices but one thought; as a leader, she clearly pays a lot of attention to the concept of the performance, not only to each track individually, but also to the concert as a story. The balance between arranged and improvised playing is perfect, as is the balance between all soloists. The Sun-Mi Hong Quintet is the best jazz band of this time, on the way to a pole position in Europe.

Personnel:
Alistair Payne – Trumpet
Nicolò Ricci – Tenor saxophone
Chaerin Im – Piano
Alessandro Fongaro – Bass
Sun-Mi Hong – Drums