Jihye Lee (이지혜) is a composer, arranger and conductor who was born and raised in South Korea, trained there as a singer, and has led her own jazz orchestra in the United States since the mid-2010s. She is based in Brooklyn and leads the Jihye Lee Orchestra, an 18-piece band whose three albums, April (2017), Daring Mind (2021) and Infinite Connections (2024), have taken the Korean Music Award for jazz twice and, in 2025, the Deutscher Jazzpreis for large ensemble of the year (international). Her date of birth and her home town in Korea are not published. Korean news reports write her name 이지혜 and spell the orchestra's name 지혜리 오케스트라.

Hers was not a musical family. JazzTimes reports that an uncle played the classical flute and that no school she attended had an orchestra or a band. She taught herself pitch on a toy recorder, had six months of piano lessons at nine, and took up guitar for a year in high school after seeing a rock show in a basement club. Her formal training was in voice: she earned a degree in voice performance at Dongduk Women's University in Seoul, and went on to a first career as an indie-pop singer-songwriter, performing under the name Jiyo, making records and teaching. She has said that although her life in Seoul was going well, the musical environment there did not make her happy.

In 2011, in her mid-twenties and with no jazz background and little English, she left for the Berklee College of Music in Boston, having never visited the United States. She had thought of becoming a singer-songwriter or a film composer; the only course that suited a composer was jazz composition, and after hearing a student big band led by the trumpeter and professor Greg Hopkins she was drawn to large-ensemble writing. Within months she had won Berklee's Duke Ellington Award, and she won it again the next year. A CJ Cultural Foundation music scholarship, which supports Korean students at Berklee and other overseas schools, helped fund her studies. She then moved to New York, where she took a master's degree at the Manhattan School of Music and studied with Jim McNeely. Sources give the move as 2015 or 2016. The BMI Foundation adds that she studied privately with Maria Schneider and Terrence Blanchard, and JazzTimes that she worked with Ted Nash and Andy Farber in the BMI Jazz Composers Workshop, the big-band composing forum founded by Bob Brookmeyer.

She made her debut as a leader at Shapeshifter Lab in New York in 2016. April, released on February 24, 2017, was crowdfunded on Kickstarter and co-produced by Hopkins. It was recorded in Boston at WGBH by an orchestra of Berklee faculty and Boston-area players, among them the drummer Mark Walker, the alto saxophonist Allan Chase and, as the featured flugelhorn soloist, Sean Jones, and Lee is credited with composing, arranging and voice. She wrote it in response to the sinking of the ferry Sewol on April 16, 2014, in which 304 people died, most of them schoolchildren. Her own notes say that she had composed "April Wind" and "Deep Blue Sea" shortly before the disaster. Reviewers at All About Jazz wrote about it with great enthusiasm.

Recognition followed in 2018. On June 14 of that year the BMI Foundation presented her with its 19th annual Charlie Parker Jazz Composition Prize, named for Charlie Parker, for "Unshakable Mind", at the 30th annual BMI Jazz Composers Workshop concert in New York; the judges were Darcy James Argue, Alan Broadbent and Ed Neumeister. The prize carried the $3,000 Manny Albam Commission, which produced "Revived Mind". In October 2018 she released As the Night Passes, a quite different record: a voice and piano album of nine of her own songs and one by the guest composer Suji Kim, sung in English, Korean and wordlessly, recorded with the pianists Vardan Ovsepian and Yoonseung Cho (see Cho Yoon-seung). In 2020 she received the ASCAP Foundation and Symphonic Jazz Orchestra Commissioning Prize. Her bios also list pieces written for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis and for Carnegie Hall's NYO Jazz.

Daring Mind appeared on Motéma on March 26, 2021, produced by Lee with Darcy James Argue and recorded at Sear Sound in New York on January 15 and 16, 2020. Its nine pieces, which include "Unshakable Mind", "Suji" (a tribute to a friend from her Boston years) and "GB" (the initials of a former boyfriend in Korea), are in her words a documentation of her first four years in New York, and the trumpeter Sean Jones was the guest soloist. The title of "I Dare You" nods to a remark by Wayne Shorter about what the word "jazz" means. The Guardian ranked it sixth among the ten best jazz albums of 2021, and it won Best Jazz Album at the 19th Korean Music Awards.

A Toulmin Fellowship from National Sawdust in 2022 let her go back to Korea to study traditional rhythms. On December 3, 2022 the Korean Cultural Center New York and the CJ Cultural Foundation opened their Young Korean Artists Series with her orchestra at The Times Center in Manhattan, a free concert that, by the Korea Daily's count, drew about 300 people. The program paired pieces from Daring Mind with her new jazz arrangements of the Korean folk songs "Sae Taryeong" and "Arirang" and with three pieces, "Born in 1935", "Eight Letters" and "Nowhere Home", that would appear on the next album. That December she also presented her music with the hr-Bigband in Frankfurt. Infinite Connections had its world premiere at National Sawdust in Brooklyn on October 15, 2023 and was recorded at the Power Station at BerkleeNYC on October 17 and 18, 2023.

Infinite Connections came out on Motéma on May 31, 2024, co-produced by Argue and with the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire as guest on two tracks and Keita Ogawa on percussion. Each of its nine pieces is built on a traditional Korean rhythm. The record is a meditation on mothers and daughters; "Born in 1935" follows the life of her grandmother, an orphan born under Japanese rule who married as a teenager. DownBeat made it an Editor's Pick, reviewing it in its June 2024 issue. The Jihye Lee Orchestra presented it at the Sheen Center in New York on August 23, 2024, it won Best Jazz Instrumental Album at the 22nd Korean Music Awards in 2025, and at the Deutscher Jazzpreis ceremony at the E-Werk in Cologne on June 13, 2025 the orchestra took the prize for large ensemble of the year (international). In spring 2026 The Jazz Gallery in New York listed the orchestra for April 4, and the NDR Bigband listed her as guest conductor of the work at NDR Studio 1 in Hamburg on May 22.

Lee is not an instrumentalist in her bands; she composes, arranges, conducts and sings. She told JazzTimes that she is not a traditional jazz composer who writes swing tunes or conventional big-band music, and that she is unsure how to answer the question of what jazz is. Critics compare her writing to Gil Evans, Maria Schneider and Bob Brookmeyer; The Guardian heard Schneider-like harmonies in Daring Mind, and Textura called her arranging largely traditional but her writing unique, restless, intricately woven and unpredictable.

She writes in a narrative, diary-like way, imagining a character or a story for each piece, a habit she brought over from her years as a singer-songwriter, and each of her albums is a snapshot of a stretch of her life: the struggles of a new immigrant in New York in Daring Mind, her family history in Infinite Connections. Since the Toulmin Fellowship she has also made Korean rhythm an organizing principle. Each piece on Infinite Connections is built on a traditional rhythm, played by Ogawa together with the orchestra's rhythm section, and the album draws on the Korean idea of han, a long-inherited grief, which reviewers heard especially in "Eight Letters". She has described Korean drumming as intricate and rich in odd meters.

Jazz is the frame for all of this: the records are credited as big-band and post-bop jazz, the band is a New York jazz orchestra, and the awards that have followed are jazz awards in Korea, Germany and the United States.