Hong Soon Dal (홍순달) is a South Korean jazz saxophonist, bandleader and festival organizer. He leads the Seoul Soloist Jazz Orchestra, a big band that formed around him in 2003, fronts a quartet and a band under his own name, and has headed the International Jazz Exchange Association (국제재즈교류협회), the organization behind the Cheonan International Jazz Street in the city of Cheonan, since at least 2018. He has made six albums that carry his name or his orchestra's, from the hymn-based My Wonderful Dream (2007) to the standards-and-songs set Blue Pearl (2017). His date and place of birth are not published, and no source states his citizenship; his work is documented in South Korea from 2003, and a 2014 Gyeongnam Domin Ilbo preview credited him with thirty years of playing experience. His releases print the name as Hong Soon Dal, Discogs lists him as Hong Soondal, and the English edition of the Health Kyunghyang site renders it Hong Sun-dal.

A 2021 Siminilbo notice for a concert with the Asan Symphony Orchestra gives his schooling. He graduated from the instrumental music department of Kyung Hee University's College of Music, took a master's degree in performing arts (practical music) at Kyung Hee, and studied for seven years at the IIDA Jazz School in Tokyo, from which the notice says he graduated. The same notice says he served as an adjunct professor in Kyung Hee's post-modern department, and a 2018 Goyang Sinmun article adds adjunct posts at Pai Chai University and Kyung Hee. A 2021 concert notice calls him Professor Hong Soon Dal.

The Seoul Soloist Jazz Orchestra is the center of his bandleading. Pressian described it in March 2011 as a leading Korean jazz orchestra, founded in 2003 and led by Hong, its director and alto saxophonist; that spring it gave its first solo concert in Seoul on March 25 and 26, in a relay of Korean jazz concerts organized around the critic Hwang Deok-ho. The orchestra's first album, D.D.R. (Dance Dance Revolution), came out on May 13, 2010 in ten tracks that include two Hong originals, "D.D.R." and "Train Travel," Lee Beom-jun's "Song for Hope," the vocalist Park Ra-on on "Jindo Arirang," "A Time for Us" and "Where Do I Begin," and a funk treatment of the popular song "Return to Busan Port." The album's notes say the band played the main stage of Japan's Takatsuki Jazz Street on May 3 and 4, 2010 to more than 2,000 listeners, describe it as the first Korean big band invited to the festival, and mention a September 2010 invitation to Kitakyushu. A second album, Paldo Yuram (팔도유람, 2012), recasts twelve regional folk and popular songs, among them "Gangwon-do Arirang," "Nam-haeng Yeolcha," "Busan Galmaegi" and "Seoul Seoul Seoul," as modern big-band jazz with arrangers from abroad.

Under his own name he first recorded with a quartet. My Wonderful Dream (BCS Music, October 2007) turns nine hymn pieces into jazz with the pianist Lee Woo-chang, the bassist Heo Jin-ho and the drummer Oh Jong-dae; the label's notes say a Japanese saxophonist named there as Oyama Hideo helped with the arrangements and call it the first album to make hymns, rather than a few tracks, the material of a whole jazz record. My One and Only Love (BCS Music, April 2009), credited to the Hong Soon Dal Quartet, is a twelve-track program of "So What," "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," the Korean children's songs "Seom-jip Agi" and "Gwasuwon Gil," the Korean pop songs "Aemo" and "Noran Syeacheu Ipeun Sanai," and the theme from the anime Mazinger Z. The label's notes say the quartet formed in 2006, that it had appeared four times on the EBS television program "Gonggam," and that it was invited to the tenth anniversary of Takatsuki Jazz Street; they also bill it as Korea's only jazz saxophone quartet, and the players on the 2009 album are not itemized.

He returned to hymns for Jazz Hymn - It Is Well With My Soul (CCM Hub, June 2012), sixteen hymns that the notes call the second of his jazz hymn projects, with the Japanese arranger and pianist Iwasaki Daisuke and the vocalists Park Ra-on, Lee Eun-jin and Kang Seong-eun as guests. Blue Pearl (Five Senses Entertainment, August 2, 2017), subtitled 바람난 재즈, is fourteen tracks and 73 minutes: nine instrumentals, including his title composition, a version of Sting's "Shape of My Heart" and Korean children's and popular songs, followed by five vocal tracks that are "The Way We Were," "Stand By Me," "Sunflower," "Where Do I Begin" and "Casablanca." The release notes say the title piece was written from the memory of swimming among sharks in sunlit water, and describe him as a bebop-centered player of standard jazz who explains the music in plain terms to audiences. 바람난 재즈 is also the name of his concert series, Hong Soon Dal's Baramnan Jazz, which he performed at the club Monk in Changwon on November 12, 2014, at the Hongseong Culture Center on June 11, 2018 and in the small hall of the Cheonan Arts Center on April 8, 2022.

He has played in many settings outside the albums. On August 29, 2014 he led a one-hour "Hong Soon Dal's Jazz & Story" concert for soldiers of the army's 11th Division and local residents at the Hongcheon Culture and Arts Center, with the vocalist Park Ra-on and five other players, on arrangements of "Libertango," "Fly Me to the Moon" and "Take Five." A 2018 Goyang Sinmun article on a charity concert at the Holt School in Ilsan says he had been invited to Osaka's Takatsuki Jazz Street ten years in a row and to Tokyo's Sumida Jazz Street as a Korean representative five years in a row; his own YouTube channel posts performances from Takatsuki in 2023 and 2024, among them his composition "Morning Dance." On May 14, 2021 he was the soloist in Piazzolla's tango suite with the Asan Symphony Orchestra at the Asan Art Hall, and in April 2022 the Cheonan Cultural Foundation presented him with his band in "Classics Heard Through Jazz," arrangements of Chopin, Grieg, Bach and Tchaikovsky. He also wrote a method book, Learning the Saxophone Through Hong Soon Dal's Model Performances (홍순달의 모범 연주로 배우는 색소폰 교본, Samho ETM, September 30, 2011, 164 pages, with a CD), and appeared as a guest on two tracks of the vocalist Yun Na-geum's Arirang Tango (2015).

The festival side of his work has grown. In 2026 he told Newsis that he began holding jazz street events in Cheonan about ten years earlier. As head of the International Jazz Exchange Association he organized the Chungnam International Jazz Street in Cheonan's Sinbu-dong district on October 11 and 12, 2025, an event Newsis said was modeled on Takatsuki's festival and attended by a Takatsuki city councillor and the founder of the Takatsuki Jazz Festival, Kitagawa Junichiro; Hong told the opening audience that the aim was to build a stage for musicians. The 2026 Cheonan International Jazz Street ran on September 12 and 13 in Cheonan Samgeori Park, with 34 groups and about 200 players, college practical-music students from five schools, and youth bands; his band, with the vocalist Lee Seon-gyeong, played the first day's main stage, and his association signed an exchange agreement with the Korean Society of Contemporary Practical Music in 2026. On October 7, 2026 his band was the house band for the Global Healthy Food Festival at Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul, organized by the Seoul Metropolitan Government.

Hong Soon Dal is alive and active as of this writing. What is not on record: a birth date or birthplace, his citizenship, the names of the players on his 2009 album, and an interview in which he describes his influences.

The Korean releases and press place him between two roles. The notes for Blue Pearl describe a player of standard jazz built on bebop who also swings, plays ballads, Latin and samba, and arranges children's songs, Korean popular songs, film themes and folk songs so that listeners new to jazz can follow, and the programs on My One and Only Love and Paldo Yuram bear that out: a modal piece by Miles Davis next to a children's lullaby, and regional songs voiced for a full big band. He is photographed on the cover of Blue Pearl playing a soprano saxophone, and Pressian describes him as an alto player.

On whether he is primarily a jazz artist, the evidence points mostly one way. His orchestra, his quartet, his band, his Takatsuki appearances, his festival work and the album genres on Korean streaming services (jazz, big band, standard jazz) are jazz; Bugs files his hymn albums under CCM and religious music, which is the competing identity, and he also teaches the saxophone and performs with symphony orchestras and in school concerts. On the strength of the records and the festival work, he is best described as a jazz saxophonist and bandleader with a large public-outreach role.