Former ECM producer Sun Chung launched Red Hook Records as a one man operation in late 2020 – eight months into the pandemic. Based in Munich but named after the vibrant Brooklyn neighbourhood, popular among musicians and artists, where Chung lived between 2009–11, Red Hook is a label “dedicated to exploration, discovery and pushing boundaries, to creating something that would not be possible in any other circumstances”. That philosophy has been particularly to the fore in the fertile ground between jazz and electronic music.

Chung’s widescreen approach to the musicians he works with is a reflection of his diverse background. He was born in San Francisco to Korean parents and spent most of his childhood in Paris; his father is the highly respected conductor, pianist and Messiaen specialist Myung-Whun Chung. In his twenties Sun studied guitar at the New School in New York and composition at Boston’s New England Conservatory; in his thirties he worked for Manfred Eicher’s ECM label, producing albums for Andrew Cyrille, Ben Monder, Kit Downes and Aaron Parks, among others. Red Hook shares a certain uncompromising Eicher aesthetic – there is a similar commitment to such principles as clarity, personality and originality, and to presenting the results in a visually arresting way.

Choosing five standout tracks from the label’s catalogue was made relatively easy by the fact that Red Hook has, to date, released precisely that number of albums, two of those within the past few weeks. A longer selection was made possible, however, by Sun Chung providing an unreleased track from a forthcoming Wadada Leo Smith & Amina Claudine Myers duo album, exclusively for The Wire.

Masabumi Kikuchi
“My Favorite Things I”
From Hanamichi: The Final Studio Recording (Red Hook, 2021)

Red Hook’s debut release was this posthumous album by the singular Japanese jazz pianist Masabumi Kikuchi, who lived in New York for more than 40 years, right up to his death in 2015, aged 75. It’s a mostly spare and tender solo final studio recording, except for passages like those in this remarkable track, one of two captivating and revelatory back to back interpretations of the Rodgers & Hammerstein classic. The melody is barely alluded to at first, yet it soon becomes brilliantly reimagined – a singsong show tune transformed, like Coltrane’s celebrated explorations, into a tour de force of unexpected accents, intervals and harmonies, clever changes in volume and density, and notes that tumble and cascade into sometimes dark and dissonant byways. “It represents so perfectly the culmination of a lifetime of dedication to his craft,” Sun Chung has said of Hanamichi. A remastered double album “deluxe version”, with extra tracks, is planned for 2025 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Kikuchi’s death.

Qasim Naqvi/Wadada Leo Smith/Andrew Cyrille
“Spiritual Is 150”
From Two Centuries (Red Hook, 2022)

This intergenerational meeting between Dawn Of Midi drummer and synth experimenter Qasim Naqvi and two elder statesmen of the jazz avant garde (and Naqvi’s previous teachers), trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and drummer Andrew Cyrille, ebbs and flows in textured patterns of sound, much like the closely drawn waves of blue lines on the album cover itself. “Spiritual Is 150” gives a fair idea of the trio’s gifts and potential, Naqvi’s modular synth blips, pips and echoes blending seamlessly with Cyrille’s deep and atmospheric percussion work, while Smith’s clear, bright and penetrating lines soar above the sometimes murky waters like a bird riding the thermals. There is an overall sense of restraint, of keen listening, of something organic and surprisingly meditative.

PJEV/Kit Downes/Hayden Chisholm
“Ova Brda I Puste Doline”
From Medna Roso (Red Hook, 2023)

Beautifully recorded at a concert in Cologne’s St Agnes Church in 2021, Medna Roso stages a wonderfully otherworldly collaboration between English pianist Kit Downes on church organ, New Zealand microtonal saxophonist Hayden Chisholm (who also plays shruti box, analogue synthesizers and adds his own throat singing) and PJEV, a Balkan female vocal quintet from Zagreb led by Jovana Lukic. Across eight traditional songs mostly about life in remote rural villages (this particular title translates as “These Hills And Desolate Valleys”; lyrics in English are provided in the CD booklet’s accompanying sleevenotes), and a series of instrumental interludes, the ensemble’s extraordinary admixture of close plaintive harmonies, thunderous organ rumbles and ethereal saxophone calls creates music at once yearning and utterly transcendent.

BlankFor.ms/Jason Moran/Marcus Gilmore
“Inward, Curve”
From Refract (Red Hook, 2023)

This “real-time digital meets analogue” trio album by electronics/tape loop specialist Tyler Gilmore (aka BlankFor.ms), acclaimed pianist and multimedia artist Jason Moran and one of New York’s most in-demand young drummers, Marcus Gilmore (no relation), was released on 1 September and features another gutsy ex-student dare – Tyler began his career as a large ensemble jazz composer and was taught by Moran at the New England Conservatory. While many of the tracks take a winningly loose, open and spontaneous line, “Inward, Curve” is the result of BlankFor.ms’s more structured approach: jazz drumbeats and acoustic piano patterns and improvisations are bent, shaped, processed and distorted by Tyler’s shape-shifting electronic feedback and effects. Moran says Refract fulfils a longtime ambition to work with an electronic musician. “I have always longed for an outside force to manipulate my piano song and drag the sound into a cistern filled with soft clay,” he explains.

John Raymond & S Carey
“Calling”
From Shadowlands (Libellule Editions, 2023)

Sun Chung recently launched Libellule Editions, a more indie-orientated sublabel. The imprint’s debut album, released on 15 September, is Shadowlands, a ruminative and dream-like record by jazz trumpeter and flugelhornist John Raymond and Bon Iver drummer and vocalist S Carey; both also play synthesizers on the recording. Much like Justin Vernon/Bon Iver’s record For Emma, Forever Ago, the album was recorded in “a small red barn” studio in the woods near Eau Claire, Wisconsin; Raymond and Carey first met as music students in the city in the early 2000s. “Calling” was the album’s first single and gives a good impression of the pleasingly indistinct territories the duo map out in Shadowlands. Patient melodies and repeated figures are augmented by long trumpet lines and a cast of collaborators that includes pianist Aaron Parks, saxophonist and clarinettist Chris Thompson and pedal steel guitarist Ben Lester; Carey’s delicate vocals are often barely above a whisper or caress. It’s somewhat inscrutable music, landing somewhere between indie folk, art pop, ambient jazz and slow motion electronica – all in a good way.

Wadada Leo Smith & Amina Claudine Myers
“Central Park At Sunset”
From Central Park’s Mosaic Of Reservoirs, Lakes, Pathways, And Gardens (Red Hook, 2024)

Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and pianist/organist Amina Claudine Myers are two lauded first wave members of Chicago’s AACM. They have made creative music together, albeit sporadically, in various contexts since the 1960s, and Smith named a recent composition in honour of his friend. Yet, surprisingly, before November 2021 in New York, their paths had not crossed in a recording studio. Central Park’s Mosaic…, which will be released on Red Hook in spring 2024, is a suite of six new compositions written by Smith (plus Myers’s solo piano piece “When Was”) that extends some of the expansive environmental, cultural, political and spiritual themes he explored in two recent major works: The Great Lakes Suites and America’s National Parks. Tracks have site-specific titles such as “The Harlem Meer” (a man-made lake), “Imagine, A Mosaic For John Lennon” and this, “Central Park At Sunset”, a slow, stately, intimately recorded musical scene that seems to contain, in each elegiac note, a joint lifetime’s wisdom and devotion. As John Corbett writes in the sleevenotes, this is “a meeting of two great spirits, a gathering of their combined forces explored in the present tense, a natural reconvening”.

Read Philip Watson's Unlimited Editions column on Red Hook inside The Wire 476. Wire subscribers can also read the article via the online library.