Keiko Lee (ケイコ・リー) is a Japanese jazz singer and pianist, born on February 17, 1965, in Handa, a city in Aichi Prefecture south of Nagoya. She is a third-generation ethnic Korean born and raised in Japan, and her birth name is Lee Kyung-ja (李敬子). She reached singing by way of the keyboard. She taught herself piano at 21, worked as an accompanist at a club in Nagoya, played hotel lounges and jazz clubs and taught music, and moved from backing other singers to singing herself on the encouragement of the people she played for. At 25 she spent about two months in the United States and sang in a San Francisco bar.

What turned that into a recording career was a New York demo. She cut trial tracks at Sony's studio in the city, and the label's A&R man Yasuhachi Ito signed her on the strength of them. The drummer Grady Tate helped put the sessions together. Imagine, her debut, came out on Sony in October 1995, recorded in New York with Kenny Barron on piano, Ray Drummond on bass and Tate on drums, with a set that ran from "Willow Weep for Me," "Lover Man" and "Summertime" to the Lennon title song.

The next four years were spent making records with the kind of band a Japanese major label rarely paid for a new singer. Kickin' It with Keiko Lee (1996) has Lee Konitz on alto saxophone, Claudio Roditi on trumpet, Renee Rosnes on piano, Ron Carter on bass and Tate on drums, with John Simon producing. Beautiful Love (1997) adds Art Farmer on trumpet and Cecil McBee on bass beside Barron, and Lee plays piano on it herself. If It's Love (1998) brings in Joe Henderson on tenor saxophone with Carter and Barron, and Day Dreaming (1999) has Jimmy Heath on tenor and sopranino saxophone.

She was also being booked as a guest. In March 1997, at Sony's Shinanomachi studio in Tokyo, she sang on three tracks of Lee Konitz's Dig Dug Dog, among them "Body and Soul." She sang on the French pianist Georges Arvanitas's Rencontre (1998), and on 12 October 1998, at Kampo Studio in New York, she recorded with Slide Hampton on the album Inclusion (1999), which also has Renee Rosnes at the piano.

By 1999 she had a working band at home: Soichi Noriki on piano and keyboards, Benisuke Sakai on bass, Yuichi Togashiki on drums and Jiro Yoshida on guitar, the group heard on Keiko Lee Live 1999 (2000). A Letter From Rome (2000) was the opposite, a record of voice and her own piano, made partly at the Forum Music Village in Rome.

Her breakout with a general audience came in 2001, when her cover of Queen's "We Will Rock You" was used in a television commercial for the Nissan Stagea. She has said that Queen's Brian May sent her a handwritten fax in response. The best-of Voices followed in February 2002 and, according to her label, sold more than 250,000 copies, a very large number for a jazz singer's album in Japan; it included an English version of a duet with a member of the pop duo CHEMISTRY. In the readers' poll of the Japanese jazz magazine Swing Journal in May 2003, she took first place among female vocalists and also won the overall Jazzman of the Year and Album of the Year categories (for Voices). By May 2009 she had topped the female vocalist category for the thirteenth year running.

The most consequential partnership of her middle career was with the pianist Hank Jones. The mini-album But Beautiful (May 2004) is a four-song set with Jones, bassist George Mraz and Togashiki. On 10 March 2006 she recorded Live at "Basie" with Jones and Sakai at the jazz club Basie in Ichinoseki, Iwate; Sony reports that it won the Swing Journal Japan Jazz Award. She also sang on Jones's Great Jazz Trio album Blue Minor (2008) and on a posthumous Jones anthology issued in 2011.

The albums since then have alternated standards, singer-songwriter and pop repertoire, and a steady yearly release schedule. In Essence (2007) was recorded in New York; Smooth (2010) was recorded at Sony's Tokyo studios in the second week of July 2010; the Beatles set Keiko Lee Sings The Beatles (2014) and the albums The Golden Rule (2019) and Voices IV (2022) all feature the saxophonist Sadao Watanabe as a guest on selected tracks, and the trumpeter Terumasa Hino appears on "Higher Ground" on Love XX (2015). Live at Jazz Inn Lovely (2020) is a trio date with Noriki, Akira Okazawa on bass and Togashiki. She has stayed with Sony for her whole career. In October 2025 she marked thirty years since her debut with Keiko Lee Sings Super Standards 3, and she turned 61 in February 2026.

Lee's calling card is her voice: low, husky and unforced, which musicians who have worked with her describe as strong enough to stand level with an instrument. Her piano background shows in how she works with a rhythm section. She started as an accompanist, and she often plays her own piano on records and in clubs, which is unusual among Japanese jazz singers of her generation. She sings mostly in English, with Japanese songs as a smaller part of the repertoire, and she is known for improvising and for fast, informal stage rapport. Around 2002 the Japanese press often compared her with the singer Chie Ayado, though Lee has kept an image closer to a working jazz musician, appearing mostly on music programs.

Her repertoire has two sides, and it is fair to say so. One side is the standards book, sung with American players: Kickin' It, Beautiful Love, Day Dreaming, the Hank Jones records, the Super Standards series. The other is a pop-facing side that sits next to it: the Queen cover and the Nissan commercial, the CHEMISTRY duet, an Another Side of Keiko Lee best-of (2008) collecting her pop-oriented tracks, a 2017 album of twentieth-century Japanese popular songs, a cover of Momoe Yamaguchi's "Cosmos" ("Akizakura"), and theme songs for television and anime. The pop recordings brought her the larger audience, but her standing rests on the jazz side: fifteen years of Swing Journal poll wins, a catalogue made with New York rhythm sections, and the late-career records with Hank Jones.