Gee Hye Lee (이지혜) is a pianist and composer who was born in Seoul and has lived and worked in the Stuttgart area of Baden-Württemberg, Germany, since 1996. By the count of the magazine Jazz thing she has made seven albums under her own name between 2009 and 2025, four of them in the piano-trio format, and in 2012 she received the Jazz Prize of Baden-Württemberg. Korean concert listings spell her name Lee Gee-hye, German reference works give the same spelling as an alternative, and her own releases use Gee Hye Lee.

She began classical piano lessons at the age of three in Seoul and won a number of prizes as a young classical pianist. According to her own biography, everything pointed to a concert career until her sixteenth birthday, when she was given a recording of Kind of Blue. Through Miles Davis she found Bill Evans and then Herbie Hancock, whom she still names as her greatest inspiration, and she says that jazz means freedom to her. In an interview with the Jazzclub Bamberg she explained that jazz could not be studied in Korea at that time, and in 1996, aged 19, she left Seoul for Stuttgart.

In Stuttgart she studied with the jazz musician and composer Paul Schwarz at the State University of Music and Performing Arts and took her diploma with distinction in 2003. A scholarship took her to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where German Wikipedia and the Bamberg interview place her in 2004 and 2005. After her return she won the 2005 competition of the Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg, which came with a scholarship. A piece of hers, "The Unnamed Tree", is credited as a composition on Schwarz's 2003 double CD Chaos Con Celerità.

From 2006 to 2019 she played a Monday-night series at the Stuttgart club Kiste, with different musicians most weeks and more than 500 evenings in all. She worked in jazz, hip-hop and soul groups during those years, plays the Fender Rhodes as well as the piano, and has said that she finds a strict separation of jazz, soul and pop senseless. She is the pianist on the three Dukespan NYC CDs of 2008, recorded live and in studio in 2006 and 2007, and her first trio CD, Midnight Walk (eleven tracks), came out in August 2009 on Universal Music Korea.

Geenius Monday (HGBS, 2010) took its title from the Kiste evenings. Discogs credits 38 musicians across its 14 tracks, among them the trumpeter Herbert Joos, the singers Fola Dada and Barbara Bürkle and the guitarist Lorenzo Petrocca, and Lee plays on nine of the tracks. Thomas Fitterling reviewed it in Rondo on December 18, 2010 as a showcase of her as soloist, accompanist and bandleader, compared her soloing and leadership to Cedar Walton and some of her voicings to McCoy Tyner, and noted how easily she moves between club jazz and Brazilian styles. Lights (HGBS, 2012), her second trio album, was recorded on June 22 and 23, 2012 at the HGBS studio in Villingen-Schwenningen with the bassist Jens Loh and the drummer Sebastian Merk.

The state jazz prize was announced in February 2012 and presented that July. It has been awarded since 1985 to musicians aged 35 or younger who live in Baden-Württemberg or have a close tie to it, and it carries 15,000 euros and a winners' concert; the jury called her playing technically brilliant and of the highest expressive quality. She now sits on that jury. Password: I Love Jazz (HGBS, 2015) followed, twelve tracks in twelve different line-ups recorded over three days at the MPS Studios in Villingen, as Werner Stiefele described it in Rondo on July 4, 2015. It brings in a big band, a Hammond organist, a harmonica player, an accordionist and the singer Nice Brazil, and it ends with "Another Goodbye Song", played with the Tobias Becker Bigband.

Alongside her own records she has been a working sideperson in the region and beyond. She is credited on the bassist Hellmut Hattler's Gotham City Beach Club Suite (2010) and on the drummer Charly Antolini's Charly Antolini Meets The Jazz Ladies (2010), on the singer Jacinta's Recycle Swing (2011), on two albums with the singer Barbara Bürkle (2013 and 2015), on Seba Kaapstad's Tagore's (2016), on Joel Locher's Intensity Of Bass (2018), on the Frank Heinz Quartett's Wasteland (2018) and on Nice Brazil's Minhas Raízes (2020). She is a member of the guitarist Frank Kuruc's quartet, and two Jazz in Baden-Württemberg compilations (2014 and 2015) carry her music.

Her trio in recent years is Joel Locher on double bass and Mareike Wiening on drums. Locher and Lee have known each other for about 20 years, according to her label's biography. Most of the music on their album What Matters Most was written during the 2020 lockdown, when she could not travel to South Korea to see her family; it came out on Unit Records on September 30, 2021, runs to ten tracks and about 53 minutes, and was reviewed in Jazz thing by Rolf Thomas in November 2021 (issue 141), who called it her third trio album and picked out "A Cottage On An Isle" and "My Funny Quarantine".

Homesickness during the pandemic also produced the project with the Korean vocalist Song Yi Jeon (전송이), the five-track Parangsae by the Gee Hye Lee Trio. It includes an arrangement by Jeon of a traditional Korean piece and a Korean children's song, and it was released in South Korea on September 30, 2022 through Sonaeum and in Germany on February 17, 2023 on meiXmusic. The trio, with Jeon, played the 19th Jarasum International Jazz Festival on October 1, 2022, a 50-minute set on the festival's free Festival Lounge stage. With Jeon, the daegeum player Hyelim Kim and the drummer Sun-Mi Hong she is also a member of the Sori Quartet, which combines Korean traditional music with jazz. The quartet played the K-Music Festival at London's Barbican on November 1, 2023 under Hong's name, a concert at CSO ADA in Ankara on July 10, 2024 hosted by the Republic of Korea's embassy and the Korean Cultural Centre there, the 35th Jazztage at the Theaterhaus Stuttgart on April 19, 2025 and the Music Meeting Festival in Nijmegen on June 9, 2025.

Encounters (meiXmusic, 2025) was recorded live at the Bauer Studios in Ludwigsburg on September 11, 2024 by the engineer Martin Dreßler, with the trumpeter Jakob Bänsch and the tenor saxophonist Alexander "Sandi" Kuhn as guests. It was released on March 14, 2025 on vinyl, in an edition of 300 copies on 180-gram vinyl according to the magazine Musenblätter, and a CD followed in 2026. All the pieces are hers except "My Favorite Things". She has described the pieces as stories of meetings: "A Journey Of Nonsense" sets a chaotic concert trip through Turkey to music, "Korea, Here We Come" anticipates a return visit, and "A Letter To Her" is a letter to her mother in musical form. The band played the Jazzfestival Würzburg and the Enjoy Jazz Festival in Schwetzingen in October 2025, and on November 20, 2025 the Birdland Jazzclub in Neuburg an der Donau, where Bavarian Radio recorded the concert. Bavarian public radio broadcast a live concert by the same band on April 24, 2026.

In October 2026 she planned a Korean tour with a quintet of Bänsch, Kuhn, the Korean double bassist Hwang Hogyu (황호규) and Merk, with dates announced for the Jazz Club Janus in Seoul (October 5), the Dalseo Arts Center in Daegu (October 7) and the Ulsan Jazz Festival (October 9). She was named a composer in residence at Aux Losanges in the Swiss canton of Graubünden for August 2026, working on a new trio album announced for late 2027 or early 2028 on Unit Records. On November 1, 2026 she is due to present new music she has composed and arranged for the IG Jazz Orchestra, at the Theaterhaus Stuttgart, at a concert marking the 50th anniversary of IG Jazz Stuttgart.

Her own account is simple: Miles Davis led her to Bill Evans and Bill Evans to Herbie Hancock, and Hancock's playing has stayed her model. In the Jazzclub Bamberg interview she adds that she grew up on Romantic piano music, above all Chopin and later Liszt, that Prokofiev and Ravel drew her toward jazz, and that her first two years of jazz playing were hard because the classical touch and phrasing made it sound stiff.

Critics place her in the mainstream of piano jazz. Writing in the Frankfurter Rundschau on March 13, 2026, Stefan Michalzik described a neo-hard-bop approach in the coordinate system laid out in the 1950s by Art Blakey and Horace Silver, with a light-handed, buoyant touch and compositions of great density, and he heard in her playing the records of Evans, McCoy Tyner and Herbie Hancock, which she has obviously studied. Rolf Thomas in Jazz thing wrote of technical brilliance and expressive depth and of compositions with their own charm. Her label describes the trio's music as melodic jazz that is deep, light and uplifting at once.

Two threads run alongside the trio work. One is Latin and Brazilian music: Dorival Caymmi's "Vatapá" on Geenius Monday, "Ladeira Da Preguiça" with Nice Brazil on Password: I Love Jazz, and a 2020 album with Nice Brazil. The other is Korean music, which she approaches through improvisation, a feature she has said jazz and traditional Korean music share. In Parangsae and with the Sori Quartet she works with Korean folk song and the daegeum, which accounts for the Ethno Jazz tag above.