Near East Quartet, also written NEQ or The NEQ (엔이큐 in Korean press), is a Seoul-based group led by the saxophonist and composer Sungjae Son (손성제) that sets contemporary jazz and improvisation beside gugak, the traditional music of Korea. On its ECM debut the lineup is Son on tenor saxophone and bass clarinet, Suwuk Chung (정수욱) on guitar, Yulhee Kim (김율희) on pansori vocals and percussion, and Soojin Suh on drums. The group has won the Crossover Album prize at the Korean Music Awards twice, for Passing of Illusion (2016 ceremony) and for its self-titled ECM album (2019 ceremony).

ECM's own background notes say Son formed the band in 2009 together with Chung, while the label's shorter description dates the group to 2010; the first album, Chaosmos, carries a 2009 release on Discogs and a September 2010 date on Apple Music. Son and Chung had met as Koreans studying in Boston, Son at Berklee and Chung at the New England Conservatory, and did not click at the time. Son was deep in bebop, and Chung, whose teachers included George Russell, was drawn to fusion guitar and Third Stream ideas. Years later, back in Korea, they played a gig together, and Son told Chung he wanted to make music from a completely fresh starting point. Son had majored in composition, studying everything from Gregorian chant to Schoenberg, and dedicated his graduation recital to Ornette Coleman. After returning from the United States he spent a couple of years playing with Kim Duk Soo of the percussion ensemble SamulNori. Chung suggested the name, explaining, in an interview quoted by ECM Reviews, that the players were born and raised in an Eastern country but shaped by a Westernized outlook, so the music feels as though it stands somewhere near the East rather than in it.

Chaosmos has seven tracks and a different lineup from the later quartet: Son on saxophone and piano, Chung on guitar and electronics, Soonyong Lee on acoustic and electric bass and electronics, and Dongwon Kim on percussion and vocals, according to the Discogs credits for the 2009 release on the GiL label. A 2010 edition came out on Genie Music. One of its pieces, "Earth & Humanity," was included in 2011 on a promotional Korea Arts Management Service sampler, Into The Light - Music Of Korea III, under the heading Jazz In Traditional Music.

The line-up changed in 2015, when, by ECM's account, the singer-percussionist Yulhee Kim and the drummer Soojin Suh joined. Son has said he first saw Kim performing a mix of singing, dance, percussion and Korean shamanic ritual, and since he was interested in shamanic ritual music at the time, he asked her to join. Of Suh he has said that she was already well known in Seoul and that after studying in the United States she returned as a much stronger player, and he calls her the one drummer in Korea for him. That year Suh also released her own album The Moon In Your Hand (Mirrorball Jazz World), on which Chung, Son and Kim play.

Passing of Illusion, billed to The NEQ, was released on Mirrorball Music on October 27, 2015, with nine tracks including "Moolle," "Deep Covenant," "Shinawi" and "Crow And Egret." At the 13th Korean Music Awards, held on February 29, 2016, it won the Crossover Album prize in the Jazz & Crossover field. Pressian reported that the group used its acceptance speech to thank, with some humor, the eight people who had bought the album.

The ECM album, Near East Quartet (ECM 2568), was recorded at Stradeum in Seoul in December 2016, with Rick Kwan as engineer and Sun Chung as producer, and was mixed at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines by Nicolas Baillard, Manfred Eicher and Sun Chung. It was released on August 31, 2018. It has eight tracks, five of them Son compositions and three traditional pieces, "Mot," "Galggabuda" and "Pa:do," blended so thoroughly that, DownBeat noted, the origin of each piece is impossible to tell. The percussionist Sori Choi joins on "Baram," and the cover photograph is credited to Fotini Potamia. DownBeat reviewed the record in November 2018, Songlines gave it three stars in April 2019, and ECM Reviews wrote at length about it in August 2019. At the 16th Korean Music Awards, held on February 26, 2019, it again won the Crossover Album prize.

ECM said European audiences would first hear the quartet live in November 2018, at dates including the London Jazz Festival. On Monday, November 19, at the Purcell Room in London, it appeared as part of the K-Music Festival and the EFG London Jazz Festival, in a double bill with the gayageum player Kyungso Park, who joined the quartet for an encore built on an hour of free rehearsal earlier that day. The Arts Desk gave the concert four stars, hearing moments close to the soundscapes of early-1970s Miles Davis and calling Suh's drumming astonishing. In July 2026 the group took part in the Korea Focus program of Jazz Fest Budapest; the Korea Times reported that it played at Rákóczi Square on July 3. The ECM release is the most recent of its three albums.

The music works on space and breath. Son has said that Korean traditional music embraces empty space instead of filling it in, and Chung adds that forward motion in that tradition has more to do with the length of a breath than with Western time-keeping. Suh describes her approach as deciding what not to play, and Chung likens the way she implies a beat to Paul Motian. The result is slow, floating music with distorted guitar, breathy bass clarinet and tenor, and Kim's pansori storytelling voice. Chung has noted that listeners do not usually hear a female pansori voice set against rock-guitar sound without a steady pulse, and that finding a common space for the two took work. Critics reached for several comparisons: Geoff Andrew heard Terje Rypdal and the Bill Frisell of Power Tools, DownBeat's Philip Freeman heard a universalist spirituality shared with the Japanese saxophonist Akira Sakata, Songlines compared Son's tone to Andy Sheppard, and the Arts Desk heard early-1970s Miles Davis.

Where the group belongs is a fair question. For jazz: ECM is a jazz label, Discogs and Apple Music file the ECM album and Chaosmos under jazz, DownBeat and Songlines reviewed it, it played the London Jazz Festival and Jazz Fest Budapest, and its members trained at Berklee and the New England Conservatory. Against: both Korean Music Awards were given in the Crossover category rather than the jazz ones, Apple Music files Passing of Illusion under Korean Classical, its vocal material comes from pansori and folk song, and Son has said the quartet does not sit squarely in the Korean jazz scene, which he finds small and closed to outsiders, so the group built its own. It is best placed as a jazz-gugak crossover group that works inside the jazz world's improvising tradition.