For a record label, eleven releases in five years might not seem to amount to much. But the eleven releases so far on Red Hook Records—one gem after another—amount to a substantial contribution to 21st century jazz. So far, the label has documented some of the contemporary greats, like Wadada Leo Smith, Amina Claudine Myers, and Jason Moran, and not just recorded them but frequently put them in unexpected situations that have produced unique and memorable music-making.
It’s been a long journey through these few steps in a relatively short period of time for Red Hook and its founder Sun Chung. He has a rich personal musical pedigree. A musician and composer, his father is the leading orchestral conductor Myung-whun Chung (next stop, music director at La Scala), and violinist Kyung-wha Chung and cellist Myung-wha Chung are his aunts. Before Red Hook, he was a producer at ECM. His personal connection to that label led to Red Hook’s first release, Hanamichi – The Final Studio Recording from pianist Masabumi Kikuchi. These delicate, measured free improvisations and de/reconstructions of standards were followed by the even finer Volume II in 2025. The four-year gap between releases of music recorded in 2013 is a window into Sun’s curatorial process with Red Hook.
Red Hook came “after working for ECM Records for almost 10 years,” he said over a Zoom connection from Japan. “I produced a dozen albums for them, and I was there as an assistant producer. And towards the last few years I was starting to get that itch of wanting to have more creative allowance. I wanted to produce more records. So the choices were to either go to work at a different record label, become a freelance producer, or start my own label. It took me a while to kind of figure out what was the best solution, but I think what mattered the most in the end was the ability to be able to create a body of work without any outside influence.”
Like several generations of jazz listeners, this writer included, Chung grew up listening to ECM, the flagship label for creative thinking in jazz—especially on the European side—for the last quarter of the 20th century. The ECM sound and style, directed by label head Manfred Eicher, have become such a recognizable brand that so far this century the label has slowly and steadily moved to a state of solid but unsurprising jazz releases, and the New Series side that started by issuing Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa has overtaken jazz in interest and importance.
That ECM-jazz space has been filled by, among others, Red Hook and another New York City jazz label celebrating an anniversary this year, Pi Recordings. For Pi, that’s been 125 releases in 25 years and a body of work that represents the creative edge of rhythmic and contrapuntal exploration in jazz and features all-time greats like Henry Threadgill and Steve Coleman, and musicians like Steve Lehman and Tyshawn Sorey pushing the boundaries of tradition.
The style at Red Hook, so far, has been more contemplative and spacious, with an emphasis on music that is more concerned with going deeper than strictly moving forward through time. The release pace seems to follow this aesthetic. It is slow because it’s essentially a one-man show, and because Sun runs what from the perspective of 2026 is an old-fashioned label. Many labels these days, including several notable ones, serve mainly as distributing imprints, taking full recordings musicians have made and financed themselves and packaging them. The traditional way Red Hook follows is to find musicians Sun would like to represent on the table, followed by a process of figuring out the material, recording it for the label, then putting it all together on vinyl or CDs. This process was behind the Kikuchi recordings, with Sun encouraging the pianist to play material he wasn’t much associated with, to hear something new rather than something expected.
“We really start from the beginning,” Sun said, “the conversation with a musician, and then see where that’s at. We exchange ideas, we debate what would be the best approach or concept for a potential recording. Then there’s a tracking part, in some ways the easy part. It’s two days in the studio after a whole lot of discussions, and then comes another very big chunk of work, which is the post production, editing.
“And of course, the finances matter, too. We have the challenge that every record needs to be successful in order to finance the next one.”
The process, so far, is “working out, and financially it could always be better. I definitely didn’t do myself a service in producing this genre of music, which is very hard to sell, so I guess the commercial aspect was never in the forefront of my decision-making, which is fine.”
Sun emphasized how specific the catalogue is: “We do receive submissions on a daily basis. I make a point to listen to everything we receive, but I don’t think we’ve ever actually released or worked with somebody who submitted [their recording].” There may be something to how Red Hook is positioned in the jazz world. Sun said, “In terms of the music we record, we have been pigeonholed at this point into a jazz label, but I wish that wasn’t the case.” But he so far has recorded musicians who work, without question, with jazz language, even when they’re put in collaboration with musicians associated with electronic production.
Maybe Sun is thinking in terms of crafting studio documents, records that represent the idea of music as an art object. “I put a big wall between a live performance and a recording,” he says, “I feel they’re two different art forms. I really enjoy making records where it would sound as if it wouldn’t be possible to do that in concert, and make it into its own musical journey.”
Still, over the summer Red Hook celebrated its anniversary with a two-night concert showcase at Roulette. The very first and very last sets outlined the edges around the label, from Myers playing solo piano and singing, and the trio of pianist Moran, drummer Marcus Gilmore, and electronic musician BlankFor.ms working through material from their recent album Shards (Myers’ Solace of the Mind was one of the best releases of 2025, and the first album from the trio, Refract, shared that same distinction for 2023).
Then there’s the name itself, which means exactly what it says, and is a story worth telling: “I lived in Red Hook between 2008 and 2012, and I moved there for one specific reason. It’s kind of crazy in retrospect, but I wanted to live next to this musician, [bassist] Ben Street. He was one of my teachers when I was studying music, and he had quite an impact on my development. I feel that I owe him a lot in terms of learning how to listen.
“I used to go to Ben’s house almost every day for a couple years, and his house became an underground hang for musicians. Aaron Parks was there a lot, David Virelles, Matt Brewer, people would just go to Ben’s house in the evening around a glass of wine, and everybody would play music that they thought they liked. And Ben was the moderator and kind of the guru. We all learned a lot during those years. And so the name is in homage to my time there.”
