Eungmin Cho (조응민) is a jazz guitarist who studied in Boston and has worked in Seoul since returning to Korea. His one album under his own name, Oriental Fairy Tale (April 21, 2015), won the Best Jazz & Crossover Performance prize at the 13th Korean Music Awards, held on February 29, 2016. He leads a group billed as the Eungmin Cho Quartet (조응민 쿼텟 in Korean press), which toured Europe on the 2016 JazzKorea Festival bill, and since 2021 he has been the guitarist and bandleader of a jazz project with Bada, the lead vocalist of the girl group S.E.S. His date and place of birth are not published, and no source states his citizenship. The record places him in Korea for about a decade: he is documented working in Seoul and at Korean festivals from 2015 through at least April 2025.

His name appears in several romanizations. The cover of his album, Apple Music, Discogs and his label's videos use Eungmin Cho (the label also writes EungMin Cho); the JazzKorea Festival listing writes Cho EungMin; English Wikipedia's list of Korean Music Awards winners gives Cho Eun-min; and Arirang TV wrote Cho Eung-min.

He came to jazz late. According to an EBS Space profile published in February 2016, he listened mostly to rock and funk as a student, and the guitar he first picked up in a university band club changed his direction. He went to the United States to study more widely, studied jazz guitar at Berklee College of Music in Boston and then completed a master's program in jazz guitar at the New England Conservatory, also in Boston. The English summary of an Arirang TV program has him first picking up the guitar at 18, just before university, and leaving school to play seriously before going to Berklee. The years of his studies, and the year he returned to Korea, are not published. A Berklee recital program dated July 15, 2009, for the Seoul-born pianist Kyu Min Shim, lists a piece called "You Gotta Have Poker Face on Friday Night" by Eungmin Cho; it later became the last track of his album.

After returning to Korea he worked in jazz bands, a Latin band and pop settings, and EBS adds Christian contemporary music and indie music to the list. His label's biography names the bands of the saxophonist Kim Ji-seok (김지석), Lee Kyung-gu (이경구) in both nonet and quintet formats, Jeong Jang-min (정장민) and Lee Hee-kyung (이희경), and says he also played on television, live and recording work for pop acts, among them Junsu of 2PM and 4Men. EBS says the guitarist who influenced him most is Pat Metheny, and his label likens his open, band-wide sense of space to Metheny's.

Oriental Fairy Tale is a quartet record made with a piano trio, and the three players who recorded it with him are the pianist Yongjun Chon (전용준), the bassist Dongha Shin (신동하) and the drummer Dongjin Shin (신동진). It runs to seven tracks: "Intro," the title track, "No Smoking," "But You Are," "New Beginning," "Snow Fall" and "You Gotta Have Poker Face on Friday Night." It was produced by We Play Jazz and released through Mirrorball Music, and two of its pieces were filmed as music videos. His label's notes describe the title track as moving from a calm, delicate opening to a hard overdriven climax, and "Snow Fall" as a piece written from memories of student life in Boston, set in 5/4 time. They also say the guitar sound was shaped with many effects pedals, outboard spatial effects and re-amping, a technique still uncommon in Korea at the time. A Herald Business column recommending new albums on April 29, 2015 praised the warm, space-filled guitar tone and the way each track found a different voice without losing lyricism.

The Korean Music Awards honored it in the performance category of the jazz and crossover field, for the ceremony held at the Guro Arts Valley Arts Theater in Seoul. Two members of the selection committee wrote the citations. One, 서정민갑, said the playing was so clear and complete that it was hard to believe it was a first album, and praised a refined, wistful lyricism that never overdid anything at a time when excess is mistaken for freedom. The other, 최규용, praised the luminous tone and delicate playing and the way the solos followed an emotional story. According to MBN, he said afterward that he had expected winners to be told in advance and would otherwise have prepared a speech, and that he would try to contribute to the growth of Korean jazz. The same ceremony gave the jazz album prize to BuYoung Lee and the crossover prize to The NEQ, the group profiled as Near East Quartet.

Around the award he became visible on Korean television. EBS Space invited him to its 2016 showcase of new faces in Korean jazz as the guitarist, with a concert on February 25, 2016, and in June 2016 videos were posted of Naver's OnStage series filming the quartet as its 289th episode and of the Arirang TV series ONSTAGE K devoting its 61st episode to him. In November 2016 the quartet was one of four Korean bands on the JazzKorea Festival tour of Europe, which opened at the Kulturbrauerei in Berlin on November 17 and ran through Berlin's Korean Cultural Centre, Budapest, Madrid, Stockholm, Rome, Brussels, Astana and Hamburg to Frankfurt on November 27, though the report does not say which dates were the quartet's; a festival report calls it the group's European debut. In 2017 a television report on the Paju book-town festival Round Midnight named the quartet among the acts on its stage.

Since 2021 his most visible work has been with Bada. A Korean news item from August 2021 says that she had been posting cover songs in her own style on YouTube with the guitarist, and the 18th Jarasum International Jazz Festival announced their joint set, billed as Eungmin Cho and Bada Jazz Liners, for a program of her S.E.S. songs reinterpreted in jazz, his own pieces and standards. The festival was moved from early October to November 5 to 7, 2021, and the official festival video from November 5 lists the band as Bada on vocals, Cho on guitar, Yongjun Chon on piano, Dongha Shin on bass and Dongjin Shin on drums, the same rhythm section as his album. The project was announced for the Ansan Yeoreumio Festival on September 2, 2023, played the Asan Art Valley Jazz Festival, held with Jarasum, on October 8, 2023, and was announced as the opening-day act of the Dangjin Ttobom Myeoncheon festival on April 5, 2025.

A second album under his own name is not listed by Apple Music, Bugs, Melon, Aladin or Discogs. Bugs also lists two Stellar Blade game soundtrack albums from 2024 on its page for 조응민, and Discogs files a separate artist named Eungmin Cho whose only entry is the 2025 vinyl release Stellar Blade (Soundtrack Mini 2), with guitar on "Dawn (Lively)" and "Oasis." Neither site says that this is the jazz guitarist.

By the account of his own label, his guitar sound is closer to Pat Metheny's open, spatial approach than to the dry, soft tone Korean listeners usually expect of a jazz guitarist, and the album was built with effects, outboard processing and re-amping to give each piece a different color. The Korean Music Awards citations stress clean, lyrical, restrained playing with a clear sense of direction, while EBS describes clean playing in a modern style, with a tone and touch that carry across jazz, pop, Christian music and indie settings. The quartet's pieces are long, four of the seven running past eight minutes, with the 11 minute "Snow Fall" the longest.

On whether he is primarily a jazz artist, the evidence leans toward yes. His album is filed as jazz by Apple Music, Bugs, Melon and the Korean Music Awards, which gave it a prize in the jazz field; the festivals he has played, including JazzKorea, Jarasum and Asan's jazz festival, are jazz festivals; and Korean media call him a jazz guitarist. Against that, his career also includes pop session and television work and a project built on a pop group's songs, and the jazz side of his output is documented by a single album.