BG Salon (박근쌀롱) is a South Korean jazz band led by the drummer and composer Park Geun-hyuk (박근혁), whom Arirang TV's English text calls Bahk Geun-hyuk. The name is printed as a lowercase wordmark, bgsalon, on the cover of the first album and is the artist name on Apple Music, while Korean stores and news articles use the Hangul 박근쌀롱 (a few articles and a record-label blurb write it 박근살롱). The band describes itself as a project: Park writes the songs and plays the drums, and the other players change from record to record and from concert to concert. Two albums carry the name, 습관의 발견 (Repeat, Pause, Play, 2011) and 현재의 발견 (2015), and the first of them won the 2012 Korean Music Awards prize for Best Jazz & Crossover Jazz Album.

Park's background is given in a Busan Ilbo interview and on the EBS Space concert page. He began business studies at Hongik University, joined the rock band Black Tetra, played drums for the first time there and left the university. He then went to the United States, studied jazz at Berklee College of Music and later popular music in a graduate programme at a California state university. The sources give no years for any of this, and no birth date or birthplace has been published. He told Busan Ilbo that jazz was hard for him at first and that what won him over was its stress on feeling, with each of ten performances of a piece turning out differently.

The release text for the first album dates the band to 2008 and says it spent about two years playing live, with several changes of members, before settling on the guitarist Charlie Jung (찰리정), the pianist Yoon Seok-cheol (윤석철) and the bassist Choi Eun-chang (최은창) as its core. 습관의 발견 came out on September 26, 2011 (Bugs dates it a day later) on Mirrorball Music, and the text calls Park the composer, arranger, drummer and producer of its ten original pieces on eleven tracks. The text says the record divides into two kinds of piece: trio-plus-guest quartets, where the guests give the compositions more expressive range, and trio pieces that leave more room for improvisation. Four guests are named: the trombonist Lee Han-jin (이한진), the trumpeter Jeong Gwang-jin (정광진), the trumpeter Junghyun Cho (조정현), who plays muted trumpet, and the vocalist Jo Jeong-hee (조정희), who sings on "Half Drunk", "Kenya", "Road to Me", "Mr.M" and "Fall Into Winter". The text also says the rhythms avoid a swing groove and lean on the even feel familiar from Nordic-label records. The album is built around a slogan, repeat, pause, play: the pause is the chance to notice a habit, and the play is a free, conscious choice. Its tracks include "Latte", "She Rain", "Static Travel", "Inner Calm" and "No Kidding!", and the one called "Road to Me" (진담) is marked as the title track.

On February 29, 2012 the album won Best Jazz & Crossover Jazz Album at the 9th Korean Music Awards, presented at AX Korea in Seoul. Edaily lists five other nominees: the pianist Bae Jang-eun (배장은), Bae Jang-eun together with Oh Jeong-su (오정수), Song Young-joo (송영주), Lee Ji-young (이지영) and Choi Sun-bae (최선배). The judges' reasons, as the paper reports them, were the inner rhythm of players who hold back rather than overreach and arrangements that carry one feeling through the whole record. Park told the audience he wrote the songs and played the drums himself, and that a prize like this encourages musicians whose approach gets little exposure. Song Young-joo's Tale of a City took the instrumental jazz prize at the same ceremony, according to Korean Wikipedia's list of winners.

The next years were mostly live work. BG Salon played the Seoul Jazz Festival's 2012 "In the Park" edition at Olympic Park on May 20, on the Belle Bridge stage, and an EBS Space Gonggam session of 2012 is online with "Static Travel", "Half Drunk" and "Kenya". Park said afterwards that he worked intensively for about a year, got tired of playing the same programme for three or four years, and took a break; a slump followed. A 2015 interview with Newsis adds that he went through a very bad year in 2014, with a breakup and the death of the grandmother who had largely raised him, and thought of giving up music; the decision to finish a record came with the support of a small bookshop in Sangam-dong, Book by Book, where the band had often played and whose owner proposed crowdfunding. The album was financed that way.

현재의 발견 (The Discovery of the Present, billed as Pause on Apple Music) came out online on October 20, 2015, with the physical release on October 23, on Mirrorball Music, with Chili Music Korea credited on the single and the press materials. Its eleven tracks include "Living Room Noir" (방콕), "55 Danyang Direction" ("D.travel"), "She River", "Happiness" (행복), "집착", "Full Drunk" (괄라), "Espresso Man" and the closing "Inner Peace" (숨, 쉼), and Park said about half of the eleven were written soon after the first album and some continue its pieces: "Full Drunk" follows "Half Drunk", "She River" follows "She Rain", "D.travel" follows "Static Travel" and "Inner Peace" follows "Inner Calm". The listed musicians were Bae Jang-eun on piano, Charlie Jung on guitar, Yoon Jong-ryul (윤종률) on bass and Park on drums, with Junghyun Cho on trumpet, Park Kyeong-geon (박경건, spelled 박경견 in several articles) on trombone and Lim Min-su (임민수) on vibraphone. The vocal on the title track "Way Home" (집으로) is by Joon Lee (준리), whom Busan Ilbo describes as based in Los Angeles. The big change from the first album was lyrics in Korean; Park told the paper he had assumed Korean words did not fit jazz, calling that a fixed idea of his own. "Way Home" was released as a single on October 8, 2015, and the album's launch concert took place on October 30 at Pomtech Works Hall near Hongik University, with Bae Jang-eun, Charlie Jung, Junghyun Cho, the bassist Sean Pentland and the vocalist Lee Ho-seok as the guests listed by Newsis. The jazz critic Hwang Deok-ho (황덕호) is quoted in the album text as saying the listener who gets through the abrasive early tracks reaches real calm in the last one.

The second record was nominated for Best Jazz & Crossover Jazz Album at the 13th Korean Music Awards. Pressian's nomination list of January 28, 2016 gives the field as Avang Trio's Blue Suns, BG Salon's 현재의 발견, Song Young-joo's Reflection, Yang Jun-ho Trio's Timeless Traveler, BuYoung Lee's Little Star and Jin Kim's The Jazz Unit. The ceremony was held on February 29, 2016, and Lee's Little Star won the category.

January and February 2016 brought the band's most visible stretch. EBS Space gave it a concert, "A Discovery of a Strange and Familiar World", on January 13 and 14, 2016, with Park, Joon Lee, Charlie Jung, Bae Jang-eun, the bassist Kim Seong-su (김성수) and Junghyun Cho on trumpet in a programme built around the second album; the Naver Foundation's Onstage series recorded the band as episode 275, posted in late February 2016, and Arirang TV's Onstage K devoted its 49th episode to it, posted on March 11, 2016. A spring concert followed on April 23, 2016 at the Belloju club in the Hongik University area, with Joon Lee flying in from the United States, the trumpeter Bae Seon-ung (배선웅), the pianist Jeon Yeong-se (전영세), the guitarist Yang Yun-il (양윤일), Kim Seong-su and Park. The latest concert found was announced for September 14, 2017, a morning concert at Nuri Hall in the Gimhae Cultural Center, with Charlie Jung, Bae Jang-eun, Kim Seong-su and Park and a programme drawn from both albums, among them "Latte", "Living Room Noir", "D.travel", "Kenya", "She River" and "Time".

Since then the trail is thin. No third album or later concert turned up in Korean news or the major stores, and the band's own YouTube channel holds official-audio uploads of tracks from both albums dating from 2022. "Way Home" has had a second life: for the 2023 television drama Yeonin (연인), the singer and actress Yeon-woo (연우) recorded "To You" (그대에게), a new arrangement of the piece with synthesisers and a repeating guitar riff, released as an OST single on August 9, 2023 and credited by the producers to the 2015 album.

Park describes the music himself as pop jazz. He told Busan Ilbo that it is not European jazz and not orthodox jazz, and that his taste for old pop songs and plain melodies gives it a different colour from both. EBS's concert note calls the sound pop jazz or gayo (Korean popular song) jazz and says its pop melodies and feeling had no equal on the Korean jazz scene when the first album appeared; the second album's Hangul lyrics, sung with a plain, warm voice, are said to recall old Korean songs. In another interview he says what he values in jazz is improvisation, which he compares to telling a loved one what you feel at the moment instead of reading a prepared statement.

He says that a drummer who composes has a particular freedom: pianists and other melody players think in harmony all the time and find it hard to write simply, while he is free of the music-theory approach and wants the pieces to come out naturally. Both albums are built from short scenes of ordinary life, such as a coffee, a half-drunk night, an espresso, a drive down Highway 55 toward Danyang, a quiet river, with titles that pair up between the records. Reviewers and presenters use words such as sensuous, urban and everyday.

Where to place it is open. Melon and Bugs file both albums as jazz, Bugs adds contemporary jazz for the second, and the Korean Music Awards honoured and nominated it in the jazz field, while Park's own label for it is pop jazz and its songs, especially on the second album, are vocal pieces with a popular-song shape. This profile treats it as a jazz band with a pop songwriter's approach.