Cho Yoon-seung (조윤성) is a Seoul-born jazz pianist, arranger and producer who works in Korea and the United States and appears on his international releases as Yoonseung Cho. He was born in Seoul in 1973, the son of Cho Sang-kook, a first-generation Korean jazz drummer, and he grew up between Seoul and Buenos Aires. His own records run from a 2000 album of jazz versions of Korean pop songs through Latin, Bach and free-improvisation projects to Brooklyn Rainfall (Blue Room Music, 2023), a piano trio album recorded in New York with the bassist Vicente Archer and the drummer Marcus Gilmore. On June 28, 2026 his quintet opened Korea's guest-country programme at Jazz Fest Budapest.

His father led him to jazz early. A 2012 Hankyoreh profile says he took piano lessons as a small child and that, in fifth grade, his father brought him to Lee Pan-keun, a leading figure in early Korean jazz theory, for lessons. The family left for Argentina in the mid-1980s (press accounts give 1985 or 1986, when he was about 13) after his father returned from a South American tour taken with the country. His father worked outside music there but bought him a grand piano, and Cho practised from the notebooks he had brought from Seoul and from his father's jazz records. He studied classical piano at the national conservatory in Buenos Aires, where a 1999 Hankook Ilbo profile places him from 1988 to 1994, and the tango and bossa nova courses that were compulsory there shaped his later Latin repertoire.

The same 1999 profile says that at seventeen he was already sitting in with senior Korean players at the Seoul club Janus, whose owner, the vocalist Park Sung-yeon, predicted he would outgrow the Japanese pianist Masahiko Sato. He went on to study jazz piano at Berklee College of Music in Boston from 1996, and Berklee lists him in the class of 2000. The profile, written as he prepared his graduation recital, reports that the head of Berklee's piano department, Paul Schmeling, praised his swing feel and intuition. His trio made its Seoul debut at Janus on June 4, 1999 with Park Sung-yeon, the saxophonist Lee Jung-sik and the trumpeter Choi Sun-bae as guests. His sisters are also musicians, a jazz singer and a classical double bassist. He later studied jazz at the New England Conservatory, and Korean press and his own biography credit him with being the first Asian to win a prize at the Paris competition named for Martial Solal, in 1998.

After Berklee he joined the Thelonious Monk Institute's programme, now the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz. The Hankyoreh says he was selected in 2001 as the first Asian admitted to its scholarship programme at the University of Southern California, and Berklee Today reports that he spent two years working with Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter there. He then taught for eight years at the Musicians Institute in Hollywood, until 2010, and his own biography lists work in Los Angeles with the Ron King Big Band, New York Voices, Gary Novak, Eric Benet and Renee Olstead. The recordings from those years include Out To Sea (2002), a voice and piano duo album with the vocalist Lisa Thorson, with whom he had co-directed a duo concert at Berklee, and Bohemian (2011, Dash Hoffman Records), a duo album with the Los Angeles vocalist Cathy Segal-Garcia that All About Jazz reviewed in April 2012.

In Korea he built a second career as a recording artist, arranger and producer. Jazz Korea (2000) turned Korean pop songs into jazz. Latin Corea (2007) set children's songs, folk tunes and the national anthem to Latin rhythms. Bach: Renovation (Sony Music, 2009) reworked the fifteen Two-Part Inventions as a solo record, and the guitar duo albums Duende (2010, with Kim Min-seok) and Reflection (2011, with Kim Jung-sik) followed. In 2011 he produced and played piano on the trumpeter Choi Sun-bae's A Trumpet in the Night Sky and on the vocalist Woong San's sixth album Tomorrow, and arranged four songs on the singer-songwriter Lucid Fall's fifth album Beautiful Days. In April 2012 he and Lucid Fall shared a three-night run at the LG Arts Center in Seoul with a semi-symphonic ensemble of about twenty players. He told the Hankyoreh then that he wanted to make popular music well in Korea, with the trumpeter-turned-producer Quincy Jones as his model, and to leave jazz to be done in the United States.

A Berklee Today feature from around 2013 described him as an in-demand sideman for concerts, recordings and television in Seoul, a member of the singer Choi Sung-soo's World Music Ensemble, and a teacher three days a week at Jangan University. It also reported that he was writing a "K-jazz" programme that mixed Korean traditional music with jazz, to be recorded with the bassist Hwang Ho-kyu and the drummer Lee Sang-min, who would add Korean string and percussion instruments; no release under that name has turned up. His own career summary adds television and film arrangements, music direction for musical-film events at Chungmu Art Hall in 2017 and 2019, and teaching posts at arts schools in Seoul. He appears on Yiruma's Yiruma & Friends: Atmosfera (Sony Music, 2015) and, as a composer, on the guitarist Charlie Jung's Upside Down (2008).

His later work is more varied. Between 2020 and 2021 he recorded a series of live-concert albums with different partners: French Impressionist music with the saxophonist Shin Myung-sup, blues with the guitarist Sungwon Kim, and two volumes of free duets with the drummer Lee Sang-min under the name JOYEE. In May 2022 his trio with Hwang Ho-kyu and the drummer Shin Dong-jin and the traditional-song singer Lee Seung-hee played Korean Jazz Nights at the Opus Jazz Club in Budapest. Nordic Chant (2022) is a solo set of twelve free improvisations that he recorded and produced himself in Helsinki, with his own paintings and photographs in the booklet, and the same year he played on the guitarist Kim Jung-sik's Hangul, Improvisation with the vocalist Jeon Song-i.

Brooklyn Rainfall was released on September 15, 2023 and is described in the Korean press as his first album issued in the United States. It holds six originals, Benny Golson's "Whisper Not" and his arrangement of Liszt's "Sonetto 104 del Petrarca", with Archer and Gilmore on the trio tracks and three solo piano pieces. The critic Yeo In-kyung, reviewing it for MM Jazz, called it the start of a serious jazz-musician's challenge and singled out its modern, Impressionist-influenced harmony. A release concert was announced for October 21, 2023 at the JCC Art Center in Seoul, with Hwang Ho-kyu and Shin Dong-jin. In 2023 he also played on the Korean vocalist Soyoung Park's Behind the Clouds for SteepleChase LookOut, with the drummer Jongkuk Kim and the bassist Changmin Jun.

Recent years have kept him in both worlds. In July 2024 he hosted a Bucheon series, "Jazz on a Midsummer Night", that opened with an evening of Piazzolla tangos with the bandoneonist Ko Sang-ji and the violinist Yoon Jong-soo. In 2025 he played on the Dutch flugelhorn player Joep van Rhijn's Between Fact & Fiction and arranged, played and produced the vocalist Cha Hyun-jung's Cha Hyun-jung Sings George Gershwin (September 29, 2025), a trio record with Hwang Ho-kyu and Kim Jong-guk, the Dutch brass player Joep van Rhijn and the saxophonist Shin Myung-sup. The Budapest quintet date in June 2026 was one of five Korean acts at the festival's Korea Focus programme, which also featured the vocalist Nah Youn-sun.

His playing starts from classical training and Latin music. The Buenos Aires conservatory years gave him a classical technique, and courses in tango and bossa nova were compulsory there. At Berklee his teachers included Paul Schmeling and Hal Crook, and Berklee Today says Latin jazz shaped his piano style. Several of his records read as projects built on a single idea: Latin treatments of Korean songs on Latin Corea, jazz inventions on Bach, a Piazzolla programme, a blues album, an Impressionist programme of Debussy, Faure, Ravel and Satie, and a set of free improvisations.

The MM Jazz review of Brooklyn Rainfall points to sophisticated harmonic progressions with a feeling for Impressionist and modern harmony, and to a classical background audible in the solo pieces ("Book of Kush" opens with Scriabin-like arpeggios). He has said he is drawn to orchestral writing and to using classical orchestration in film and pop music, which explains the large share of his work in arranging and producing, and he told the Hankyoreh in 2012 that Quincy Jones was his role model. No interview in which he names favourite pianists was found.