Song Nam Hyun (송남현) is a South Korean double bassist, composer and bandleader who works in Seoul. He is best known for two things: a solo double bass album released on April 20, 2023, Finally, i climbed over the verdant hill (마침내 나는 신록의 봉우리를 비집고, usually shortened to The Verdant Hill), which was nominated for Best Jazz Instrumental Album at the 21st Korean Music Awards on February 29, 2024, and his seat as the bassist of the trio Mandong (만동). His birth date, birthplace, schooling and teachers are not published anywhere that could be found. His name is romanized more than one way: the Korea Herald and the Korean Music Awards listings write Song Nam-hyun, Discogs files him as Song Namhyun, and his own releases on Spotify and Apple Music read Song Nam Hyun and Song nam hyun.

The Segye Ilbo wrote on November 29, 2024 that he had been giving himself to music for about twenty years, and his earliest dated credit on record fits that: in 2015 he was the double bassist and effects player of The South Korean Rhythm Kings, a free-improvisation quartet with the tenor saxophonist Kim Oki, the vocalist Pyo Jin-ho and the drummer Kim Chaek. The record note for their CD 뿌린대로 거두리, recorded at the Cactus studio in Seoul in 2015 and issued by Mirrorball Music, says the music was made through free improvisation with almost nothing planned in advance, and that Song mixed it. The group's second album, the LP Self Ethnography (Blue Red Sounds Club and Kim Chaek Music, May 2020), adds the keyboardist Chin Sooyoung, was pressed in the Czech Republic in 300 copies and was recorded by Seongrock Lee.

From 2020 he released a run of records under his own name, mostly on the Mirrorball Music and Nambong Music imprints. The five-track EP Low.Slow.Bassforte (April 7, 2020) opens with "Zero Hour" and includes a piece titled "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" and another titled "Everyone Wants to Be Haden"; Beyond Sound (March 11, 2021) is a four-track EP that ends with "Bolero"; and Low.Slow.Bassforte 2 is a seven-track record whose titles run from "Carta Privida" and "A Juntarnos" to "Gethsemane". The Segye Ilbo says he also led tango and improvisation projects and made several albums it calls jazz tango, without naming them.

The Verdant Hill is the record that brought him attention. It has ten pieces, among them "The Shackles of Stigma", "The Second Wave", "Tone and Gesture" and a "Bass Solo Version" of "The otherside of midnight", a title that also appears on Mandong's album BIG SUN. The Segye Ilbo calls it the first double bass solo album in Korea and describes it as music made after passing through a dark stretch of life, with some pieces heavy and others lifting toward green. At the 21st Korean Music Awards the winner of the category was Soojung Lee's Four Seasons, and the other nominees were Heo Daeuk, Jung Su-min and the pianist Mijung Lim. He told the newspaper that a solo double bass record does not draw a crowd and that concerts are hard to arrange, and that he treats the work as a discipline. On December 8, 2024 he gave a solo concert in a series of performances built around the idea of exercising sense and thought, showing old and new solo pieces and described by the paper as the starting point of a second solo album.

Mandong is a guitar, double bass and drums trio. It began in 2019 as a duo of the guitarist Haam Seokyoung and the drummer Kyungsoo Seo, and in the band's own account Song was first asked to play as a session musician before a filmed performance and then joined for good. Its records on BTPrecords include Man in a Hurry (2020) and BIG SUN (February 10, 2022), which was nominated for Best Jazz Album at the 20th Korean Music Awards on March 5, 2023, a category won that year by Song Young-joo's Atmosphere. The Bat followed on October 9, 2023. The credits of those albums do not itemize who plays what, so this profile names Song on them only through the band's own line-up. The trio plays instrumental music that the members decline to place in one genre: in a December 2024 interview with Fake Magazine the guitarist said they have never agreed on a genre to pursue, while Song said a jazz language lies underneath because it comes from the study that shaped him. The trio has toured Hong Kong and Taiwan, was booked at the Jarasum International Jazz Festival in 2024, and played a joint concert with the singer-songwriter Kim Sa-wol (김사월) at Moraenae Market in Seoul on July 5, 2025.

He also writes for the singer-songwriter Youra (유라). The Korea Herald reported on October 14, 2024 that Youra x Mandong began when she enrolled at a music academy that Song runs, and the Segye Ilbo says he composed many of her songs. Their joint EP 이런 분위기는 기회다 (The Vibe Is a Chance, Mun Hwa In, 2022) credits Song on double bass, with Mandong arranging and composing alongside Youra, and in 2024 he released three singles with her. Other work from 2024 includes the single "For example, blue" with the singer-songwriter eAeon (April 23, 2024), the musical direction of a women's traditional-music theatre production at the Ansan Arts Center in summer, and a stint on bass in the band of the Argentine pianist Pablo Ziegler, who worked with Astor Piazzolla, during Ziegler's visit to Korea. In July 2026 Youra's EP Brush credited him with composing, arranging and playing most of the instruments on two of its tracks.

His recent releases move in different directions. 준비왕 the Prep King, nine pieces issued on CD on November 25, 2025 (Discogs files it as jazz), was followed on January 9, 2026 by All (전부), a trio album with Kim Oki and the drummer Kyungsoo Seo built on ten Korean proverbs, on which he plays bass, guitar, synthesizer and telephone, shares the composing and arranging with the other two, and co-recorded, mixed and mastered the album. On August 22, 2026 he released BIG BLUR, twelve tracks with guest singers including Youra, eAeon, Jungwoo, Wonstein and Woo Jee-won, which Apple Music files under rock.

The one thing every source agrees on is that Song does not stay inside a genre. The Segye Ilbo writes that his music sounds at times like jazz, at times like classical, rock or new age, and the shelves bear that out: free improvisation with The South Korean Rhythm Kings, a Bach chorale and a bolero among the titles of his early EPs, an unaccompanied bass record, a song-driven partnership with Youra and a rock-filed album in 2026. Within Mandong he is the composer who wants melody, harmony and rhythm to be satisfied before anything else, in his words in the Fake Magazine interview, and he has said the band's genre label is a blank he would rather leave open. None of the interviews found names a teacher or an influence; the nearest thing is his stint in Pablo Ziegler's band, a concert he calls one of the highlights of 2024, which ties him to the tango line of Astor Piazzolla.

The jazz case rests on the Korean Music Awards nominations (his solo album in 2024 and Mandong's in 2023), the way the Korean press and the awards file both, his regular credits beside Kim Oki and Kyungsoo Seo on Korean free-jazz records, and Discogs genre tags of jazz, contemporary jazz, avant-garde jazz and free jazz on several of those records. The competing side is real: songwriting and production for a pop and indie singer, a band whose members avoid the word jazz, and a 2026 album filed as rock.