Jack Lee (잭 리, the Hangul spelling used by the Seongnam Cultural Foundation in 2005) is a Seoul-born guitarist, composer and producer who has recorded jazz and fusion albums since 1990. Discogs gives his birth name as Jack Woojin Lee and his birth date as September 2, 1966, and a 2011 AllAboutJazz piece by Doug Payne gives the same date and city. He took up the guitar in sixth grade and played in amateur bands, and in 1983, while a student at Whimoon High School in Seoul, he left for the United States. He studied computer science at Columbia University with music as a minor, worked as a disc jockey at the New York station WKCR-FM, where he heard a wide range of jazz, and took guitar lessons from Larry Coryell, Emily Remler, Bill Connors and John Scofield, according to his biography and Payne. A 2005 Korean press release called him a Korean-American guitarist, while Discogs and MusicBrainz file him as South Korean; his promotional biography says he has promoted jazz in his hometown of Seoul for almost twenty years, and his Bandcamp page gives Seoul as his base. Not to be confused with the American songwriter Jack Lee (1952 to 2023) of the Nerves.

His own biography says he started on rock, with Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and Jeff Beck, before discovering the sounds of Pat Metheny, Larry Coryell and Miles Davis. The Seongnam release names Metheny, John McLaughlin and Toninho Horta as the players who first drew him in.

His first album came out of New York. In 1989, the 2005 release says, he met a gugak musician named Jang Seok-sik and began planning a jazz record built around samulnori, the Korean percussion quartet tradition, and the resulting debut, Poong-Un (풍운, "Winds and Clouds"), includes improvised pieces with a samulnori group. The album is dated 1990 on Bandcamp and JazzMusicArchives, while Discogs dates the Warner Music Korea LP to June 1991; a US CD under the title What Now followed on Par Records. His second album, Magnolia Blossom (목련꽃, 1992, Warner Music Korea), was made with the Brazilian guitarist Toninho Horta, who became his most durable collaborator. The same release says he took part, as the only Asian musician, in a Russia-Rio-New York jazz festival in Moscow, where his blend of rock, jazz and Korean traditional music was praised. Gracefulee (1993), recorded at Clinton Studios in New York with Rachel Z, James Genus, Charles Blenzig and Alex Foster, and Gracefulee 2 (1994), with Blenzig, Norihito Sumitomo, Billy Kilson, Foster and Gil Goldstein on accordion, are both listed on his Bandcamp page and on JazzMusicArchives, and Horta guests on each.

During the 1990s he also played and produced for others. Discogs credits him on guitar on Back to the Groove by Wayne Henderson and the Next Crusade (1992), on Threshold by Chico Freeman and Brainstorm (1993) and on Horta's Foot on the Road (1994), and as a producer, with Norihito Sumitomo and Yo Muto, of the saxophonist Takeshi Itoh's Groove Island (1994). With Horta he made Into the Night (1996, billed with Bob James, Hilary James and Mark Ledford as featured players), From Belo to Seoul (1997) and K-Pop Melodies (2000), a set of Korean pop songs reworked in Brazilian style and recorded in Rio de Janeiro. He co-produced Horta's own Serenade (1997).

Asianergy (styled Asian*ergy on the sleeve), the album and the band, arrived in 2005 in Korea and in February 2006 on VideoArts Music in Japan. Its core was Lee with the Malaysian percussionist Lewis Pragasam, and the album description on Bandcamp names Horta, Sumitomo, Blenzig, Harvey Mason and Dave Grusin among the guests. On December 21, 2005, Jack Lee and Asianergy played the Concert Hall of the Seongnam Arts Center in a programme called All That Jazz in Seongnam, alongside Bob James and his Angels of Shanghai band with Nathan East, after Larry Carlton had played the night before. The release billed him as a legend among Korean jazz fans and a "godfather" of Korean jazz, wording that is the presenter's and not a ranking. A photograph taken at a concert on December 18, 2005, whose caption describes him as supporting Bob James's band on guitar while also bringing Asianergy, shows him on stage.

The Bob James relationship became a long one. Lee played guitar and co-produced one track, "Endless Time", on James's Urban Flamingo (2006), then helped James coordinate and produce the Chinese-instrument album Angels of Shanghai (VideoArts Music, February 22, 2006, in Japan), where he is the guitar soloist on the opening track. A reviewer at JB's Spins singled that solo out in June 2007. Asianergy 2 (2007, JL Music) brought in James, East, Charles Blenzig, Sumitomo, the Indonesian pianist Idang Rasjidi and, as an acoustic guitar guest, Kazumi Watanabe. In 2006 he, Watanabe and the Hong Kong guitarist Eugene Pao had made Guitar Sam Guk Ji, a trio album with Pragasam on drums, billed to the Asian Super Guitar Project. Botero (2009, VideoArts Music), billed to Jack Lee and Bob James, was recorded in Seoul and Los Angeles between April and September 2009 with East, Melvin Davis and Pragasam. Payne's AllAboutJazz review in 2011 called it possibly the most significant album James had made in a long time, and added that it feels more like a Jack Lee record with a guest than an equal collaboration.

Letter (2008) is an album of love songs with the Danish singer Annekei, with Horta, James and East among the guests. Guiding Light (2012, KT Music) was recorded in Seoul, Tokyo and Bangkok across 2010 to 2012 with Blenzig, Sumitomo, Pragasam and the bassists Tetsuo Sakurai and DeeHo Kim. In 2015 he produced and played guitar on the vocalist Woongsan's Japanese-label album Temptation, an album that also carries Charlie Jung, Lee Ritenour, Nathan East and Terumasa Hino, and the Korea JoongAng Daily reported on August 26, 2015 that he and East arranged a song for the boy group Sweet Sorrow's album.

Pray (Truspace Records, 2016) paired him with Harvey Mason on drums, the Korean bassist Hogyu Hwang and Blenzig, with Annekei, Billy Kilson, East (on vocals) and Sumitomo as guests. It was recorded in Korea in June to August 2016 and mixed in Tokyo, and it includes his own pieces beside Pharrell Williams's "Happy" and Metheny's "Unity Village". La Habana (July 2019) was recorded in 2018 in Havana, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Mexico, and his own notes call it his fifteenth album as a leader: East plays on most tracks, Steve Ferrone on most of the drums, Antonio Sanchez on two, Mason on one, with Michael Thompson, Blenzig, Sumitomo, Horta and Alex Foster as guests. Between the albums he issued the single "Patience and Hope" (April 2020), the four-track Messages EP (January 2022) and "Snow Falls" with the Korean traditional vocalist HaYunju (January 2023).

His latest album is Heart and Soul (Truspace Records, September 2023), credited to Jack Lee and Nathan East. It is a concept album of spiritual melodies, from Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" and Fauré's "Libera Me" to Stevie Wonder's "Have a Talk with God", "Amazing Grace" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water", with John Beasley on piano, Noah East on organ and Steve Ferrone on drums.

Jack Lee works in the contemporary end of jazz: fusion, smooth and world-influenced guitar music, with a melodic, lyrical touch that his biography describes as gentle and flowing. JazzMusicArchives files his albums under post-fusion contemporary, and Discogs tags them Fusion and Contemporary Jazz. Payne heard Pat Metheny in the title track and "Dream with You" on Botero, a basis like that of Earl Klugh in the pairing with Bob James, and riffs in the manner of Larry Carlton on "April". A quoted endorsement from Bob James on the Asianergy page praises its blend of jazz with Asian and South American rhythms.

Two threads recur. One is Brazil: Horta appears on a long run of albums from 1992 to 2019, there are Jobim songs on Letter and Botero, and the 2000 Rio recording of Korean pop songs is a Brazilian reading of home material. The other is Korea and Asia: samulnori on the first record, "Arirang" on Gracefulee 2 and From Belo to Seoul, the pan-Asian line-ups of the Asianergy records, and the Asian Super Guitar Project. The writing and playing are jazz-led throughout; the one record outside that line, Heart and Soul, is a gospel and hymn programme played by a jazz band. He also produced a Korean pop album in 2000 (Jasmine Lee), which Discogs files as pop, but no competing non-jazz career is documented.