Hong Deok-pyo (홍덕표) was a South Korean trombonist, counted by the Korean press among the first generation of the country's jazz musicians. For most of the 2000s he was one of the veterans who played Thursday nights at the Seoul club Moonglow, and he passed away in 2007. A column in the JoongAng Ilbo gives his name in Chinese characters as 洪德杓. The Korea JoongAng Daily spelled it Hong Duck-pyo in 2004, while Discogs prints only the Hangul. He is known only as a sideman and a live performer: no record under his own name has turned up, and the one release that credits him is a tribute CD for the trumpeter Kang Dae-gwan.

His birth year is not settled. A 2016 concert announcement carried by Hankyung gives 1930 to 2007 for his years, while the JoongAng Ilbo column gives 1931 to 2007. The ages printed during his lifetime fit the same window: 73 in the Dong-A Ilbo of May 2002, 72 in the Korea JoongAng Daily of April 2004, 75 in the Kyunghyang Shinmun of October 2004, and 77 in the Dong-A Ilbo of May 2005 and in EBS's listing of January 2005 (Korean newspapers often count age the traditional way, which explains most of the spread). The header therefore says "about 1930". No source found gives his birthplace, his family, who taught him to play, or the dates of any job he held.

The only account of his early life is a JoongAng Ilbo column written soon after his death by a columnist who attended the memorial concert at Moonglow. It says he joined a military band of the Korean Constabulary, the army's forerunner, and as a Korean War veteran advanced as far as Sinuiju with his trombone. It then sums up his working life as the United States Eighth Army stage, the orchestra of the saxophonist Lee Bong-jo, TBC (Tongyang Broadcasting) and KBS, without giving years for any of them. No second source repeats these details, so they are given here as the column's account. A 2025 essay on the early history of the saxophone in Korea lists him among the players of the clarinetist Eom Tomi's group in a 1967 TBC broadcast, but the uploader of one surviving clip of that broadcast names a different trombonist, so that appearance is not counted here.

He enters the record as a member of the band that the pianist Shin Kwan-woong assembled. According to the column, Shin held a year-end jazz festival at the National Theater's Haeoreum Theater on December 25, 2001 and gathered the scattered veterans of earlier decades for it: Hong, the clarinetist Lee Dong-ki (이동기), Kang Dae-gwan, Ryu Bok-sung, Kim Soo-yeol, Choi Se-jin, the bassist Jang Eung-gyu (장응규), the drummer Jo Sang-guk (조상국), Park Sung-yeon and Kim Jun. The column says Shin coined the name "Korean Jazz First Generation" on that occasion.

The newspapers then follow the group through a series of small stages. In May 2002 the Dong-A Ilbo listed him on trombone, aged 73, with Choi Se-jin on drums, Lee Dong-ki, Shin and Jang Eung-gyu, at Jazz Park, a free stage at the Textile Center in Samseong-dong where Kang Dae-gwan also played. A May 2003 report on the same series, filed from the Teheran Valley business district, described a free evening that packed the hall with office workers and noted that the trombonist Hong Deok-pyo sometimes played with his foot instead of his hand. In March 2004 Newsis named him among nine first-generation players, with Choi Se-jin, Jo Sang-guk, Lee Dong-ki, Kim Soo-yeol, Choi Sun-bae, Shin, Kim Jun and Park Sung-yeon, who were to play a tribute on April 6, 2004 at Once in a Blue Moon in Cheongdam-dong for the percussionist Kim Dae-hwan, who had died on March 1. The Korea JoongAng Daily announced the same night, billed as "the Korean version of the Buena Vista Social Club", and listed him as a percussionist, although every Korean report found calls him a trombonist.

By the autumn of 2004 the veterans had a regular home. The Kyunghyang Shinmun of October 7, 2004 visited Moonglow, Shin's club near Hongik University, on one of its Thursday nights and described a six-piece band of Choi Se-jin on drums (74), Kang Dae-gwan on trumpet (69), Hong on trombone (75), Shin on piano (58) and Lee Dong-ki on clarinet, "players who kept jazz alive for 40 or 50 years or more". EBS's concert listing of January 6, 2005, for a night billed as Korean Jazz First Generation, called him "the magician of the trombone". In May 2005 the Dong-A Ilbo listed him again, aged 77, among the five veterans of a Jazz Park concert at the Textile Center with the singer Choi Hee-joon, and a Kyunghyang guide to jazz clubs in September 2006 still sent readers to Moonglow to hear him.

On disc he appears once. Kang Dae-gwan's 70th birthday tribute CD, 고희 헌정 라이브 앨범, issued without a year and marked not for sale, bills him by name (홍덕표) on track 10, "Night Train", which is his feature, and in the closing "All Jam" on "Now's the Time" with Kang, Kim Soo-yeol, Lee Dong-ki, Lee Jeong-sik, Shin, Park Sung-yeon and Malo. The Discogs entry names no instruments, so the trombone comes from the press.

He passed away in 2007. The Munhwa Ilbo of May 26, 2007, writing about the Thursday band, noted that the "master of the trombone" Hong Deok-pyo had died not long before. The JoongAng Ilbo column describes a memorial concert at Moonglow on Thursday, May 10, with the young trombonists Lee Han-jin and Seo Jeong-yeon, the saxophonist Lee Jeong-sik, Choi Sun-bae on a trumpet that played so freely it verged on frenzy, and Kang Dae-gwan, who said he could not hold back his tears, drank heavily and broke down after a few bars. The heat of "Night Train" moved the columnist to read out a poem of his own. The exact date of his death and its cause are not published, and no obituary was found.

The same column records his one saying, that jazz is philosophy, which the column glosses, in terms of his own lifelong passion for fishing, as freedom, communication and creation. The documentary Bravo! Jazz Life (2010) is tied to his memory too. Its director Nam Mu-seong told the Munhwa Ilbo in December 2010 that he had happened to host the memorial gatherings after Hong's death in 2007 and Choi Se-jin's in 2008, before he set out to record the surviving veterans on film; a Sports Hankook profile of Shin in January 2011 describes a large black and white photograph on the Moonglow wall of the film's stars, with Hong in a flat cap, and marks him as deceased. Later tributes keep his name in view: Shin Kwan-woong counted him among the departed members of the band in a 2018 Chosun Ilbo report, and Yonhap reported that a concert for the 2022 Seoul Jazz Festa set aside a moment to remember the first-generation players who had died, naming Hong first.

No interview, review or liner note describes his playing, so this section sticks to what the reports show.

He was a swing and standards trombonist in the veterans' band, which worked from the common repertoire: "Night Train", "Summertime", "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing" and "Take the 'A' Train" are among the numbers named in reports of the shows he played. The EBS listing called him a trombone "magician", the 2003 report noted his habit of playing with his foot in a solo, and the JoongAng Ilbo column links him to the Eighth Army, broadcast and Constabulary band world from which the first generation emerged. What is not known is any account of his influences, his tone, his phrasing or the style of arrangements he played, and no solo of his is documented beyond the "Night Train" feature on the tribute CD.