Eun-Chang Choi (최은창) is a South Korean jazz bassist who plays double bass and electric bass and works in Seoul. He is one of the founding members of the jazz-funk band JSFA, which he started in 2008 with his wife, the pianist Jiyoung Lee (이지영), and two friends. He is also the bassist on records by the vocalist Park Sung-yeon, the trombonist Joonghwa Jung and the band B.G. Salon, and on several of Lee's own albums, the latest of which, Forest of Oblivion, came out on October 16, 2026 with his name on the billing. He teaches as well. No album led under his own name is listed on Discogs, Apple Music or Bugs, so his career is documented through band, sideman, mixing and production credits. His birth date and birthplace are not published.

His name is printed in several ways: Eun-Chang Choi on Discogs, on Apple Music and in his band's own video credits, Eun Chang Choi on the sleeve of Eulogy, Eunchang Choi in All About Jazz and on JazzNode, and Choi Eun-chang in Korean name order on several other pages.

He did not start out as a musician. In a March 2023 interview with Jazz Avenue he said he was a good student who assumed his path ran through university and a job, though he grew up around music: his mother had studied piano and taught neighborhood children at home, and he was a devoted radio listener. His Bugs biography lists a bachelor's degree in social studies education from Seoul National University, completed in February 2000. In 1993, in his first year there, a senior took him to All That Jazz in Itaewon, where he heard a concert by 정성조, a teacher he later called his professor and who has since passed away. He has described the shock of a room where Koreans and foreigners of every age listened to the same music, and the next few years of chasing anything labeled jazz without believing he could play it. After military service, in his mid-twenties, he enrolled in a one-year course at the Seoul Jazz Academy and gave himself that year to find out whether he could do it; he decided before the year was out that he could.

He went to the United States and earned a master's degree in jazz performance at the University of North Texas, where Jiyoung Lee, whom he had married before they left Korea, was studying as well. He told Jazz Avenue that for more than a year in school his own playing sounded stiff and unnatural to him, until repeated lines in interviews with jazz musicians settled into an idea: playing jazz means singing through your own instrument. It took him another two or three years to turn that into a way of practicing. He was one of four students the school chose for a lesson with Ray Brown, who told him to play the chords on the bass while memorizing a tune's melody, and in 2005, in New York just before returning home, he had a long lesson with the bassist Matt Garrison on writing music from recorded fragments.

According to his Bugs biography, he toured the United States from September 2004 to July 2005 with Maynard Ferguson and His Big Bop Nouveau Band. Lee told All About Jazz in 2014 that the band's drummer was a college friend who passed their names to Ferguson when he needed a bassist and a pianist; they sent demo recordings, and Ferguson, then 75, took them both. Choi came back to Korea in August 2005.

The same biography lists the work that followed: the Ulsan Jazz Festival with a quartet of Lee and the saxophonist 임달균, filmed EBS Space Gonggam sessions, the Seoul Jazz Festival with the Vian Quartet, appearances with a trio of the pianist Song Young-joo, a 50th-anniversary concert for 김덕수, and singers' concerts of the pop and ballad kind, among them a Sejong Center show for the singer 김윤아. It adds that he lectured at Dongduk Women's University, the Seoul Institute of the Arts and the Dong-ah Institute of Media and Arts. In March 2023 he introduced himself to Jazz Avenue as head of the applied music department in the graduate school of culture and arts management at Chugye University for the Arts, a longtime lecturer at many schools, a member of JSFA and an occasional player outside jazz.

JSFA is where his name is most visible. The notes to the band's 2009 debut say that Choi, Lee, the saxophonist Jeesok Kim and the drummer Sangmin Lee formed an electric jazz-funk quartet in the spring of 2008. Choi wrote two of the ten pieces, "Carla" and "Dissatisfaction," and the album's liner note is his, dated September 2009. In it he describes recording the way the band played clubs, with the players in a circle and amplifiers miked and bleeding into each other's microphones, almost no overdubbing and many takes thrown away over small mistakes, and he writes as the person who mixed the record himself, knowing it would come out rough and wanting it that way. The same notes say he and Kim were preparing a community website for working jazz musicians where the album could also be bought. The band went on to release Season 2: The Return of JSFA!! in December 2013 and the single "Sketchy" in October 2016, and it is still playing: on October 8, 2026 at All That Jazz in Seoul, on October 11 on Jarasum island at the 23rd Jarasum Jazz Festival, and with a Club Evans date listed for November 11. The band's own profile on JazzProfiles.com covers its full history.

His partnership with Lee runs through her solo records. He is credited as bassist and, with Lee, as producer of her second album Closer to You (2010), and a 2012 EBS Space Gonggam performance of its title piece with Lee and the drummer Chris Varga is posted on the band's channel with his name as bass. He plays on Eulogy (2016), the elegy she wrote in mourning for the victims of the Sewol ferry disaster and for a friend lost during her student years; its quartet was completed by the saxophonist Sungjae Son and the drummer Jun Young Song (송준영), and Bugs named it one of its albums of the month for December 2016, its critic saying Choi's bass line deepens the sadness of the title piece. In December 2013 he was the bassist of her acoustic project at Olympus Hall in Seoul, with Son on saxophone and Song on drums. He mixed her 2022 EP New Trio, although the electric bass there is played by Bonam Gu. Forest of Oblivion is billed to Lee, Choi, the saxophonist Soojung Lee (이수정) and the drummer Dayeon Seok (석다연), and the label's text describes it as Lee's fifth album, with Choi on bass and some tracks recorded two years earlier with Soojung Lee, whom the text calls the late saxophonist.

Elsewhere he is a working sideman. On Park Sung-Yeon With Strings (Audioguy Records, 2013), the singer's album of standards with a string orchestra, Discogs credits him on bass beside the pianist Song Young-joo, the drummer Jong-Dae Oh and the guitarist Jin-Woo Ok. He is the bassist in the core trio of B.G. Salon's first album, with the guitarist Charlie Jung and the pianist Yoon Seok-cheol, according to the album's release text; that record won Best Jazz & Crossover Jazz Album at the 9th Korean Music Awards in February 2012. He plays bass on Joonghwa Jung's Moon Dance (2016). On the 2014 Yiruma special jazz album Atmosfera, produced by the guitarist Minseok Kim, Discogs credits him on bass for nine tracks, and Apple Music files two pieces under the trio of the pianist Songyi Lee, Choi and the drummer Do Hun Lee, with credited musicians including Hee Kyung Na on vocals on "I" and Son on saxophone on "Maybe." Smaller credits include electric bass on a track of the Barberettes' 2014 vocal album, acoustic bass on a Korean court music ensemble's 2010 recording, and a bass credit on Winterplay's Jazz Cookin' (2019), arranged by Juhan Lee.

In October 2019 he gave a concert billed "Choi Eun-chang x Kim Dae-ho" at the former Lebanese embassy building in Yongsan, part of the Seoul Jazz Week series from the producer Page Turner. The Newstomato reviewer reports that he said he would not recite jazz history but would read his own life and music aloud like a book, and played pieces by Pat Metheny, Charlie Haden and Henry Mancini. He told stories of a dream in which Haden tells him to be himself and play his own melody, of the uneasy feeling of playing brisk swing tunes just after the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster, and of the shame of using music as a tool for approval. He closed with Bill Evans's "We Will Meet Again."

Choi is a bassist of the mainstream jazz tradition who moves easily into funk. He plays both double bass and electric bass, and release credits do not always say which: JSFA's second album lists electric and double bass, a Korean court music ensemble's 2010 recording lists acoustic bass, and a track on the Barberettes' 2014 album lists electric bass. JSFA is a band built on jazz harmony and solos over funk, R&B and hip-hop rhythms. The label's notes for the JSFA debut single out "Carla," his lyrical pop-jazz ballad with a melodic bass solo, and "Dissatisfaction," built from a minimal tune and chord sequence that the band shapes by playing. Bugs's critic hears his bass line as what deepens the grief of Eulogy's title piece.

His own account of his playing is more about attitude than technique. Ray Brown and Charlie Haden stand behind it as teacher and dream mentor, and he told Jazz Avenue that a video of John Patitucci advising younger players sounded almost identical to what he tells his own students, and that D'Angelo's Voodoo, with its deliberately loose bass and drums, showed him how far feel can bend the rules. He says the question to ask is what you want to hear, and that jazz history is a record of people breaking rules. Session and television work for pop singers fills part of his career, but his albums, festival bookings and teaching all sit in the jazz scene.