Charlie Jung (정철원, Jeong Cheol-won; known in Korean press as 찰리 정 or 찰리정) is a guitarist born in 1977 in Cheongwon, North Chungcheong Province, who plays blues-rooted jazz; Korean newspapers call him a leading guitarist of the country's jazz and blues scene, and he has worked from Seoul since the late 2000s. His own releases and Discogs bill him as Charlie Jung. He told the press that he took the name in the United States because "Cheol-won" sounded to American ears like "Charlie", and it stuck. He has made records under his own name since 2008, plays in a Hammond organ trio, appears on several albums by the vocalist Woong San, and taught for many years at Howon University before leaving the post in 2025 to concentrate on playing.

The route to music was indirect. A 2019 Sports Hankook profile says he taught himself guitar from a chord book in his first year of middle school after seeing a guitar film, and learned Eric Clapton's "Tears in Heaven" within a few months after discovering that his father played well. He enrolled at Gyeongju University to study hotel management, spent more time in the campus band, and entered military service in 1996. A knee injury sustained in a football match led to a medical discharge. In 1999 (a 2012 news report says 1998) a friend in Los Angeles urged him to come over, and he took cleaning jobs and, because of his martial arts training from the army, work as a taekwondo instructor.

On a visit to the Musicians Institute in Hollywood he was struck by the way its Guitar Institute of Technology taught, and he entered it in 2000, paying for the fees with night taxi driving and restaurant and billiard-hall work. He says the first term was hard, then everything fell into place, and that he graduated in 2002 as the top student in his class; the school later featured him among its alumni success stories. After graduating he played in Black clubs and in Koreatown around Los Angeles. From 2002 to 2006 he was a member of the trio of the Korean pianist Cho Yoon-seung, led his own trio, and played in an R&B band called Bell Diamond. In 2003 he began private lessons with the guitar teacher Ted Greene in North Hollywood, which lasted about two years and which he calls the central musical influence of his life.

He moved back to Korea for good in 2006 for family reasons, according to the 2019 profile (other accounts say 2007), and began performing again in 2007. From 2007 until 2014 he taught guitar at the Seoul Jazz Academy, and from 2009 he taught at Howon University in the applied music department. A 2014 news item adds that he was also teaching at Sangmyung University's graduate school and joined the faculty of the Korea International Arts Institute that autumn. A 2020 profile says he became a full-time professor at Howon that year. In a June 2026 interview he said he resigned from the university in 2025 because teaching and administration left too little time to play, and that he now takes only a few private students.

His recordings from Korea start with two jazz albums, Alone Together and Upside Down; a 2012 report named them as the albums that first won him recognition at home. Upside Down (Sound Sketch, Sony BMG, 2008) has six tracks: four standards, among them "Giant Steps", "All the Things You Are" and "Every Time We Say Goodbye", and two originals, the opener "Charlie's Angelino", credited to Cho Yoon-seung, and "Tom & Jerry", credited to Jung. The year of Alone Together is not published in the sources found.

In February 2012 came Goodbye McCadden, which the press called his first blues album. It has eight tracks, six of them his own, and was recorded in Los Angeles over the summer and winter of 2011 with local session players and engineers. In July 2014 the Charlie Jung Band put out a digital single, "Sangdo Blues", named for the Seoul neighbourhood where he settled after returning, played live in a single take with the organist Ki Moon Sung (성기문), an electric bassist and a drummer, and in December 2014 the full album Sunshine Blue followed. Nine of its eleven tracks are his compositions, the producer Park Geun-hyuk co-wrote three, and Ki Moon Sung's Hammond organ is central to the sound. That year readers of a Korean jazz poll voted him musician of the year, and the same reports listed his appearances at the Seoul Arts Center jazz festival, the Jarasum Jazz Festival, the Penang Jazz Festival in Malaysia and the Vladivostok international jazz festival.

The organ trio became a group of its own. Trio Works, with Ki Moon Sung on Hammond organ and the drummer Jong Dae Oh (오종대), recorded Gunsan Gaka on August 15, 2019 at The Nora Stage Y, with three of its eight tracks taken live. It was nominated at the 17th Korean Music Awards (announced January 2020) in both the Best Jazz Album and Best Jazz and Crossover Performance categories, and the trio has since played the Jarasum, Seoul Forest, Taehwagang and Daegu jazz festivals and the Kumamoto Jazz Festival in Japan.

Sein's Blues (autumn 2020) is a different kind of record: nine originals and four remakes played alone on acoustic guitars, his first unaccompanied instrumental album and the first of a planned three-volume series. It includes the piece "Kailash Blues", written after a two-week trip to Nepal in January 2020, and a Ted Greene style reading of "Someone to Watch Over Me". It was a nominee for Best Jazz and Crossover Performance at the 18th Korean Music Awards (announced January 2021). Where Are We Going? (Sound Republica, December 2021) adds seven pieces, including "Kailash" and a new version of "Blue Alert". In 2020 the Jarasum Jazz Festival gave him a place in its Beyond programme, The Guitarist, with the guitarists Cho Young-deok and Kim Suyu, and on July 31, 2021 the festival's online edition opened with his playing of 이별의 초상 and "Old Man River". At the 2022 Korean Entertainment and Arts Awards he received a jazz artist award, which Cort's English biography calls the Jazz Performer Award.

Away from his own releases he has played in the band behind the vocalist Woong San on several albums: Tomorrow (2011, as credited on the 2023 vinyl edition), Temptation (2015), where the guests include Lee Ritenour, Nathan East and Terumasa Hino, and I'm Alright (2018), produced by the pianist John Beasley, with the guitarist Paul Jackson Jr. also on the record Korean press reports of 2012 also list the guitarist Han Sang-won among his collaborators.

His most recent work is a mix of projects. 休滿 (Human) (2024) is a two-track release with the artist Joongwon that streaming services file under experimental electronics rather than jazz. In August 2024 his Kailash Band was among the groups invited to the Jirisan Jazz Festival at the Cheoneunsa temple. In November 2025 he was billed as one of six guitarists in the concert "The Musician" at Gavin Art Hall in Seoul. The Charlie Jung Kailash Band album Kailash Band appeared on February 27, 2026, and in May the band released "Oh, Gloria", a cheer song for the South Korean national team at the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which the Korea Football Association publicly thanked him for. He told Kyunghyang that he wrote it to reach a wider audience than the jazz and blues stages normally do, and he announced a World Cup viewing concert with the Kailash Band at the SPACE MOVE venue in Sangdo-dong for June 25, 2026. An August 26, 2026 house concert at the Haman Culture and Arts Center was billed with his trio, the bassist 김대경 and the drummer 고명석, and the pianist 민주신.

His playing is rooted in blues. Cort's biography says it also draws on rock, jazz and pop, and praises a warm, deep tone and a wide dynamic range. A Sports Hankook columnist wrote in 2019 that the early recording "When Did You Leave Heaven?" sounds like the electric style Larry Carlton played from the late 1970s into the 1980s, and that his blues phrasing carries an unusually natural Black-music feel for a Korean player. Jung himself calls Ted Greene the only mentor of his musical life, and the same profile says he jams readily with rock guitarists as well as jazz and blues players.

He leans toward blues as much as toward jazz, and that is part of the picture. Discogs files Upside Down under contemporary jazz and Gunsan Gaka under jazz and blues with swing and soul-jazz styles, Korean festivals and awards place him in the jazz and crossover categories, and he has played with the jazz vocalist Woong San for years. At the same time much of his output is plain blues, the unaccompanied Sein's Blues is a solo acoustic record and the 2026 cheer song is a stadium-style anthem. This profile treats him as a jazz-blues guitarist who works across the border.