Sungjae Son (손성제) is a South Korean saxophonist, bass clarinetist and composer, best known as the leader of Near East Quartet, the Seoul group whose self-titled album came out on ECM in 2018. He plays tenor and soprano saxophone and bass clarinet, and the credits on his records add piano and, in 2026, pump organ. Korean press ages given at the time place his birth around 1971 (33 in a 2003 interview, 38 in a 2009 one); a birth date and birthplace have not been published. He has taught practical music at universities in the Seoul area: a 2009 profile met him in his office at Dongduk Women's University, and Newsis described him in 2021 as a professor of practical music at Howon University.

His route into jazz ran through classical music. According to a 2003 Weekly Hankook profile, his father collected classical records and had him taking piano lessons from the age of five; he switched to clarinet in elementary school, went on to Seoul Arts High School, and then studied composition at Yonsei University, where he entered in 1990. A jazz craze was under way, and he and his classmates passed time in a cramped room playing fusion by Casiopea and David Sanborn. In his second year he bought a cheap Taiwanese soprano saxophone at the Nakwon instrument arcade and taught himself to play it. His father, who supported the move into jazz and bought him a Selmer saxophone, died just before he left for the United States.

In Boston he studied at Berklee, where, the 2003 and 2009 profiles report, he won the school's cum laude honour and studied with the saxophonists Bill Pierce, George Garzone and Antonio Hart. ECM's background notes add that he majored in composition, spending time on everything from Gregorian chant to Schoenberg and on twelve-tone and serial music, and that his graduation recital was dedicated to Ornette Coleman. He then spent about a year and a half in the graduate programme at Queens College in New York, where, Weekly Hankook wrote, he became the first Korean to receive a master's degree in saxophone and moved over to tenor. He paid his way in Boston and New York by waiting tables and delivering food, and within a year of starting at a downtown club, unpaid at first, he was being paid forty to fifty dollars. He did not warm to New York's emphasis on technique, but he remembered hearing Joshua Redman at a small bar near his apartment, where Redman could play as he liked.

He came home in February 2003 after about six years abroad. Later that year he released Nouveau Son, a vocal jazz album of fifteen tracks on the With33Music label, for which fourteen Korean pop songs of the 1980s and 1990s, chosen in an online and street vote, were arranged for jazz. He did not want to imitate American standards, he told the paper. He is credited as arranger and on tenor and soprano saxophones, with the trumpeter Juhan Lee as co-producer and trumpeter, and the vocalist Nam Yeji (남예지) on the first track. Weekly Hankook called him a coming force in Korean jazz. He continued with Repertoire & Memoir (Stomp Music, March 23, 2006) and I'll Be Seeing You (Stomp Music, 2007), and by 2009 the Segye Ilbo counted four albums to his name. That year he told the paper he preferred to play unfamiliar repertoire, brought the janggu and jing of Korean percussion into his music, and also led an electric trot band.

Son has said he formed Near East Quartet with the guitarist Suwuk Chung in 2009 (ECM's longer text) or 2010 (its shorter text and most press); their first album, Chaosmos, appeared in 2009 and 2010 on two labels. The group found its present form in 2015, when the pansori singer Yulhee Kim and the drummer Soojin Suh joined, and its second album, Passing of Illusion (2015), and its ECM debut each won the Crossover Album prize at the Korean Music Awards, in 2016 and 2019. Genie quoted the Dong-A Ilbo as calling the ECM release the first time a Korean musician had reached the label on his own, without foreign players, and Newsis later called it the first ECM album by a band made up entirely of Koreans. Son has said the quartet does not sit comfortably in Korea's small jazz scene, which he finds closed to outsiders, so the group built its own scene.

Alongside the quartet he has kept a second career in song. In 2011 he released Elegy of Rain (비의 비가), a singer-songwriter album with guest vocals by colleagues including Hareem (하림) and 이상순, which Newsis noted as a jazz musician's pop record. In 2016 he produced 37년, the comeback album of Jung Mijo (정미조), a 1970s star returning after thirty-seven years; a liner essay on Bugs credits him with composing, arranging and playing on most of it and describes the remade "개여울" as a duet for his bass clarinet and the piano of Eunyoung Kim. He also produced her 2020 album Free as Wind Till the Last (바람같은 날을 살다가), according to Newsis. He composed "마침표" on IU's Palette (2017). In October 2021 he released a second pop project, the six-song EP To the One Who's Changed (변해버린 너에게), writing every song and singing it himself. Between these he made A Farewell To An Unknown Friend (2014), a saxophone trio record with Eunyoung Kim on piano and the drummer Junyoung Song.

In recent years he has appeared with Chung, the bassist Hyunkyu Kim, the drummer Sanghyeon Park and the singer Xani in a quintet at the 20th Jarasum Jazz Festival in October 2023; played Tokyo's BAROOM on February 10, 2024 with the drummer Shinya Fukumori and two guitarists, in a video of the piece "Rindoh"; and released the duo album Night on Earth: Dissolve into Light (August 2025) with An Gwang Hyeon, as Apple Music lists it. On July 31, 2026, Red Hook Records issued Peace Anthems, a thirteen-musician album marking the label's fifth anniversary, with proceeds going to the International Red Cross; Son's contribution, "The River of Imjin," layers his tenor saxophone, bass clarinet and pump organ in two minutes and fifteen seconds. The same album includes tracks by Wadada Leo Smith and Andrew Cyrille.

Son describes jazz as a music built on different cultures meeting, so bringing his own Korean background into it feels natural to him. He has said that Western and Eastern music share a love of sound and silence, and that Korean traditional music is distinctive in leaving empty space open instead of filling it. He treats the sung texts of the pansori-based pieces as sound and rhythm rather than meaning, so listeners need no translation. As a player he tends to serve the music rather than lead it: Jazz Weekly's George W. Harris heard his reeds supporting a mood and leading by serving, and DownBeat's Philip Freeman noted that he often plays held, background tones, and that when he does take a solo, as on "Ebyul," it is short, well chosen and emotionally strong. Harris singled out his breathy tenor on "Pa:do" and his sighing tenor over rumbling drums on "Ebyul," while Freeman described "Jinyang" moving from gentle, ritual-like textures to a forceful, drum-driven climax with saxophone and guitar.

His writing grew out of the same impulse he described in 2003: to bring the jazz sensibility to music he loved at home rather than copy American models. That led from jazz treatments of 1980s and 1990s Korean pop on Nouveau Son to the blending of original pieces with traditional Korean folk songs on the ECM album, which DownBeat said were joined so well that the origin of each piece is hard to tell.

Where he belongs is a fair question, and the evidence runs both ways. For jazz: ECM is a jazz label, his training was at Berklee and Queens College, his instrumental albums are filed as jazz on Discogs and Apple Music, he has played Jarasum, and DownBeat and Jazz Weekly reviewed the ECM album. Against: the quartet's Korean Music Awards came in the Crossover category, part of his catalogue is pop and singer-songwriter work, his best-known pop credits are as composer and producer, and the gugak material is as central to the quartet as the improvisation. He is best placed as a jazz saxophonist and composer who works across Korean traditional music and Korean pop.