Francesca Han (프란체스카 한) is a pianist, composer and improviser who was born in Korea, trained there as a classical pianist, and built her jazz career in Seoul, New York, Tokyo and now the south of France. All About Jazz calls Seoul her native city, and her own biography describes Korea as her native country. She began piano at six and studied classical music and composition at university. Korean press from 2011 and 2012 prints the name of the pianist behind her debut album as 한지연; she bills herself internationally as Francesca Han, and her releases, Discogs and festival listings all use that form.

She came to jazz late. In an All About Jazz interview she said she discovered it in her third year at university, when a friend who was a classical composer gave her a CD after she played one of his pieces at a concert. The CD was Bill Evans's You Must Believe in Spring, the first jazz album she ever heard. At the time she was also playing keyboards in a rock band, and she remembers Korea then having very little jazz beyond a few players who had come back from Berklee. The first jazz club she played was Janus, the Seoul club founded by the vocalist Park Sung-yeon, who she said expected anyone who played there to play with her. The two became friends. Her own biography says she had rapid success in Korea, and the Lyon venue Le Périscope describes a promising debut on the stages of Seoul.

In 2004 she moved to New York and earned a master's degree in jazz performance at Queens College. Her biography names her teachers there as the pianists David Berkman and Bruce Barth, the trumpeter and arranger Michael Mossman and the saxophonist Antonio Hart. She also had lessons with the pianist Jason Moran, which she said took almost a year to arrange, and with the trumpeter Ralph Alessi, whom she met in 2011. Over about eight years in New York she played Dizzy's Club, the 92nd Street Y, Kitano, Smalls and other rooms, and festivals including Jarasum in Korea, Taichung in Taiwan and Penang in Malaysia. Her biography says her quartet Jayu, which blended jazz with traditional Korean music, won praise from the New York Daily News for a concert at the Jamaica Center. Her first album, Francesca Han (M.M. Records), was released in 2009, and Korean press in January 2011 described it as her first album, released in the United States.

Before leaving New York she recorded the quartet album Illusion with Alessi, the bassists Drew Gress and Corcoran Holt and the drummer Justin Brown; her French biography dates the recording to 2011, and it was issued in 2012. She then went back to Korea around 2011 to 2012 and stayed about two and a half years, by her own count, and there released her first solo piano album, Ascetic (Audioguy, November 27, 2012). All About Jazz's Ian Patterson called Ascetic an outstanding solo statement. Duo concerts in Seoul with the trumpeter Alex Sipiagin were recorded and released as Dream Episodes (2014). In 2013 she gathered the tenor saxophonist Kim Oki and the double bassist Kim Sung-bae for concerts in Seoul, and in May and September 2014 the three recorded Blue Suns as the Avant Trio, a set of first takes, freely improvised, which came out on ILIL Sound in 2015 and as a vinyl edition on Pleasantville Records in 2016. A third Korean-based project, a trio with the bassist Sunyong Lee and the drummer Dongjin Shin, produced Icarus (2015). In 2016 came Body & Soul, a voice and piano album of standards with Park Sung-yeon. Her French biography adds that she taught at several universities in Korea, among them the Seoul Institute of the Arts.

She moved to Tokyo in January 2015. The Jazz in Japan site reviewed her trio at No Bird in Ginza on September 8, 2016, with Takashi Sugawa on bass and Gene Jackson on drums, and noted that she was relatively new to the Tokyo scene yet sounded fully formed. Her concert diary shows regular dates at Apollo in Shimokitazawa, at Body and Soul and Softwind in Tokyo, and trips back to Seoul, among them a duo with Park Sung-yeon at Janus on November 18, 2017. On March 21, 2017 she recorded a trio session at Tokyo's Studio Dedé with Sugawa and the drummer Shun Ishiwaka. It stayed unreleased for nine years.

Since the summer of 2019 she has lived in France. In October 2021 she invited Alessi to the Studio La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, in the south of France, and the two recorded the duo album Exude on October 29. It came out on the HANJI label (HJCD001) on October 6, 2022, with release concerts at AJMI in Avignon, Le Périscope in Lyon and Les Caves de l'Abbaye in Beaune. Reviews ran in All About Jazz, Jazz Journal, Jazziz, Jazz Magazine, Citizen Jazz and Culture Jazz. Jazz Journal's Mick Wright called her a South Korean pianist whose playing sometimes recalls the reflective sides of Abdullah Ibrahim or Paul Bley.

In the spring of 2023 she met the double bassist Pierre Fenichel and the drummer Fred Pasqua, and the three formed the equal-partner trio WAKAN. Their first album, Being Dantès, drawn from Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, was recorded in December 2024 at Studio Recall in Pompignan and released on October 3, 2025 by HANJI through Inouïe Distribution. Compositions are shared among the three. She also plays solo piano, at Jazz in Arles on May 23, 2024 and at the Jazz Campus en Clunisois in Cluny on August 22, 2025, and she teaches jazz piano at the Conservatoire Ouest Provence Michel Petrucciani in Istres.

October 2026 brought the long-delayed trio record. Sisyphus, with Sugawa and Ishiwaka, is seven original pieces recorded in March 2017 and mixed and mastered at Studio Dedé in June 2025. It was released on HANJI (HJCD004) and in Japan by HANJI with Free Flying Productions, after two singles, "Detour" in late August and "Cowelessi" in September. It opens with "Petit Soleil", a lullaby she wrote for her first son while pregnant, and includes "Chrysanthemum (for Kikuchi)", a dedication to the pianist Masabumi Kikuchi. Michael Pronko of Jazz in Japan wrote the liner notes, and Sue Yang reviewed the album for All About Jazz on October 18, 2026. She celebrated the release with Sugawa and Ishiwaka at Shinjuku Pit Inn on October 13.

Her autumn 2026 schedule ran through Asia: WAKAN played Cotton Club Sounds Hannam in Seoul on October 8, the 23rd Jarasum International Jazz Festival on October 9, Club Muddy in Gunsan on October 10 and the Taipei Jazz Festival on October 11, followed by duo dates with Sugawa in Japan and with Stacey Wei in Taiwan. Still ahead are WAKAN at La Meson in Marseille on November 14, 2026 and at Espace Sorano in Versailles on January 9, 2027.

Her biography says her music holds the subtle feeling of classical music alongside the uninhibited energy of rock, and critics hear a pianist of touch, space and slow-building structure. Patterson found her mature, intuitive and daring after only two recordings. The French critics of Exude wrote of chamber jazz in a ballad mode, restrained and delicate, and of solo concerts of melodic elegance, rhythmic rigor and soft melancholy. Pronko hears a light touch fused with an intensity of expression on Sisyphus.

Her own touchstones, from her All About Jazz picks, are Evans for tone and calm lyricism, Wynton Kelly for a crystal-clear sound, Bud Powell as a transcription source, Thelonious Monk for compositional structure (she came to him through her lessons with Moran and played "Monk's Dream" often), Miles Davis's Sorcerer for selective phrasing, Kikuchi's Tethered Moon for emotion controlled with space, Gonzalo Rubalcaba's solo album Fe Faith as a model for playing alone, and Moran's Artist in Residence. Alessi, she said, began her first lesson with a single short phrase and no chords or rhythm. She also names Keith Jarrett and John Coltrane among the players she came to after Evans, and her "Count Yourself" was written with Coltrane's "Countdown" in mind, taken at a gentler pace.

Scope is clear: every album she has released is a jazz album, from standards on the debut and Body & Soul to the free improvisation of Blue Suns and the originals on Sisyphus. The Korean folk song "Arirang" is a track on Exude, and the Jayu quartet blended jazz with traditional Korean music, but her classical training and early rock keyboard work sit behind a jazz career.