Sun-Mi Hong wins the Paul Acket Award 2025

Sun-Mi Hong is the winner of the Paul Acket Award 2025. This prize is awared annually to an artist who deserves wider public recognition for their extraordinary musical quality.

South Korean-born drummer, composer and bandleader Sun-Mi Hong (1990) moved to the Netherlands at the age of 21 and studied at the Conservatory of Amsterdam. She leads her own Sun-Mi Hong Quintet, with which she performs internationally and has released several albums. The most recent, Fourth Page: Meaning Of A Nest, was released in 2025. Hong has become a key figure in the new generation of Amsterdam jazz musicians and has established herself as a leading musician within the European jazz scene. She has previously been awarded an Edison Jazz Award and won the Dutch Jazz Competition.

With the Paul Acket Award ‘Artist Deserving Wider Recognition’, named after the festival’s founder, the organisation wants to draw attention to exceptional jazz musicians who deserve more recognition and a larger audience for their work. Sun-Mi Hong will receive the award during the NN North Sea Jazz Festival, where she will perform with her quintet on Friday 11 July.

“Hong’s approach to the drums is idiosyncratic and can be described as modern swing, with poetic accents and narrative patterns. She combines groove, dynamics and subtlety, with small accents that support the composition”, says jury member and Bimhuis programmer Frank van Berkel. “As a composer, she combines structure and improvisation, with tension arcs that hold the attention and invite active listening. She challenges musicians to improvise within clear frameworks, with room for both personal expression and collective interaction.”

The international jury also consisted of Pelin Opcin (Programming Director EFG London Jazz Festival/UK), Martyna van Nieuwland (Founder MVN Culture/Poland), Guy van Hulst (programmer TivoliVredenburg/NL) and Robert Soomer (artistic manager Metropole Orkest/NL). They each nominated three names from the current generation of Dutch musicians under the age of 40 who they believed deserved the award. From this selection, they unanimously chose Sun-Mi Hong.

Previous winners of the Paul Acket Award include Kit Downes (2024), Eve Risser (2023), Kris Davis (2022), Julian Lage (2019), Kaja Draksler (2018) and Donny McCaslin (2017). Since 2023, the award has been presented annually in one of the categories Global Edition, European Edition and Dutch Edition; Sun-Mi Hong wins in the latter.