Jo Young-deok (조영덕) is a South Korean jazz guitarist who came to notice in 2012, when the trio he leads won the grand prize at the Jarasum International Jazz Competition. Since then he has worked as a bandleader, a sideman, a film-score composer and a festival guest, and his catalogue rests on two trio albums, a duo album with the bassist Daeho Kim and a film score. He studied at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, where a 2026 report says he entered in 2007, and he was still a student there when the competition was won. His birth date and birthplace are not published; a report on a Berlin concert in November 2015 calls him a 28-year-old, which places his birth in 1987 or 1988.

His name is spelled several ways. His own releases and Discogs print Jo Young Deok (the trio is billed Jo Young Deok Trio, shortened to JYD Trio on the covers, and Discogs also lists Young Deok Jo), while the Jarasum festival's English pages print Cho Young-deok. The Hangul is the same in every source.

The trio came out of his Kyung Hee class. Newspaper reports describe him, the bassist Park Ji-woong and the drummer Choi Yoseph as classmates who entered in 2007, and the trio was already playing in January 2012, when it was one of two student bands booked for a mini-concert at the gala of a university jazz festival at Coex in Seoul. In October 2012 Jo was one of five finalists in the sixth Jarasum International Jazz Competition, alongside the saxophonists Lee Seung-won, Pureum Jin and Choi Kyung-sik and the drummer Choi Bo-mi, each playing a half-hour set on the final day, October 14, at the festival grounds in Gapyeong. His trio took the grand prize. Reports from January 2013 add that the jury was unanimous and that he also won the Best Soloist award, though a 2026 university release credits that award to the trio's drummer, so the point is not settled. As the previous year's winner, the trio opened the Jazz Island stage on the first day of the festival's tenth edition, on October 3, 2013, ahead of the Erik Truffaz Quartet.

The following months were busy. The educational broadcaster EBS picked the trio, along with the pianist Lee Ji-yeon, the group Kuma Park and the singer Lee Joo-mi, as one of its "New Faces of Korean Jazz 2013" for its Space Gonggam concert programme, with Jo's episodes airing on January 14 and 15. In April his trio opened a series of lunchtime lobby concerts at Kyung Hee's international campus, held around UNESCO's International Jazz Day, and the 2013 Readers' Poll concert of the magazine Jazz People listed him as its rising star for guitar. In 2011 he had taken part, as a player, in the recording of an album by the flutist Lee Kyu-jae.

His first record, Attelage, came out on September 5, 2013 on Mirrorball Music under the name JYD Trio. The album carries three covers, Charlie Parker's "Dewey Square", Carla Bley's "Lawns" and Django Reinhardt's "Django's Tiger", and the Korean Cultural Centre in Budapest later noted that Jo wrote all the songs on it except three. The Cultural Centre's English text, which spells the title of his own "WoonPaWolRae" (운파월래), explains it as moonlight shining between parting clouds. Tenasia's December 2013 review of the album, in its list of records worth watching, praised a player in his mid-twenties who kept to the basics of bebop guitar, passed down from Charlie Christian, and who got a good, steady tone without effects pedals.

In May 2014 he was one of five guitarists at a tribute day for Jim Hall at the Audio Guy Studio in Seoul, playing a set with his own trio beside Park Yong-gyu, Park Yoon-woo, Charlie Jung and Han Woon-gi. In February 2015 the Olympus Hall's "Evans Day" series gave him a night in a "Guitar Triangle" with Yoo Woong-ryeol and Lee Dong-seop. In these years he also played guitar for the French-style singer-songwriter Miseon Renata: Tenasia's January 2014 review of her album Isatjim ssadaga (이삿짐 싸다가) names him with the pianist Yoo Seung-ho among the jazz players on the record, and a February 2015 concert in Daegu billed him and Park Ji-woong in her jazz quintet.

In October 2015 he and the bassist Daeho Kim released Nostalgia as the duo Acousticology (어쿠스틱콜로지), an album for guitar and double bass alone. In an interview with Ohmynews he said the idea came from the label, whose head proposed a format Korean jazz had not tried and pointed to Pat Metheny and Charlie Haden's Beyond the Missouri Sky. The two were Kyung Hee senior and junior and had come to know each other in 2011 on the Lee Kyu-jae album. Jo wrote seven of the nine pieces, starting with "Nostalgia", which gave the record its title, and played a classical guitar on it; he named "Sea Breeze" as the one closest to his heart. A release concert followed on October 17, and Sports Seoul reported that the recording used six or more microphones on the two instruments.

A month later he went abroad with the trio. The Korean Cultural Centre in Berlin's third Jazz Korea festival, on November 22, 2015 at the Kesselhaus, put five Korean acts on one bill, among them the Jo Young-deok Trio, and Money Today's report from the hall described a trio that mixed Lee Ritenour's soft touch with the textbook playing of Jim Hall and kept a pop sensibility. The trio then played the Korean Cultural Centre in Budapest on November 29. Two of its pieces from that tour, "How Deep Is the Ocean" and "The Sunrise", are on the 2016 Nagel Heyer compilation Just Jazz - Jazz Korea, recorded live in November 2015, per the release notes, at the Korean Cultural Center Berlin.

In 2017 the trio turned toward Korean instruments. Its second record, Inner Side, was released on May 17, 2017, and press accounts say it brings in the daegeum and sogeum, Korean bamboo flutes, for what the trio calls a Korean sound. That summer it entered the Sori Frontier competition of the Jeonju International Sori Festival, a showcase for Korean-rooted world music. It passed the live preliminary on July 21 in Seoul, one of three of seven teams to go through, and at the final on September 24 won the third prize, the Frontier Award, with a creation grant of three million won. First prize went to the singer Lee Na-rae and second to Akdan Gwangchil. Newsis described the trio's sound as built on refined chords inside an Eastern scale with simple rhythms and inventive ideas.

He is also a working sideman across Korean music. Discogs credits him on guitar on Unity (2018) by the hip-hop artist Samuel Seo, on "Hellevator" on Stray Kids' Mixtape (JYP Entertainment, 2018), and, uncredited, on Doyoung's "Night Air" from the soundtrack of the television series Cafe Midnight. The press names him among the guitarists on the singer-songwriter Jung Mil-ah's second album, released digitally on November 28, 2017. For several years he was the guitarist of the jazz-funk band JSFA, listed as such for the Daelim Museum's Sunday Live concert on July 2, 2017 and in a May 2019 line-up for the Taehwa River Jazz Festival in Ulsan, and MusicBrainz also lists him among its members. On October 9, 2018 he was the acoustic guitarist of the world-music ensemble E-Do, led by the cheolhyeongeum (a Korean zither) player Ryu Kyung-hwa, at Rich Mix in London, the second concert of that year's K-Music Festival run by the Korean Cultural Centre UK.

His next major festival slot was a platform of his own. In 2020 the Jarasum Jazz Festival gave him one of three places in "The Guitarist", an edition of its Beyond programme, with Charlie Jung and Kim Suyu; the festival's announcement introduced him as the winner of the 2012 competition, and because of the pandemic the 2020 festival was streamed online over 17 days. In November 2020 a concert at the Namdong Soraeart Hall in Incheon was announced for the pianist Yoon Han with Jo on guitar, Choi Yoseph on drums and Hwang Ji-seong on double bass, and on February 28, 2023 he joined Yoon Han again for a matinee at the Raum Art Center in Seoul.

In 2021 he wrote the music for the documentary Speed of Happiness (행복의 속도), directed by Park Hyuk-ji, about two mountain-hut porters in Japan's Oze National Park, which was shown at the 25th Busan International Film Festival and the 18th EBS International Documentary Festival and opened on November 18, 2021. The soundtrack album of acoustic pieces appeared the same day under his own name.

In 2023 he led the trio Duck Street, with the bassist Lee Seong-chan and the drummer Choi Byeong-jun. Festival announcements for the 20th Jarasum Jazz Festival named it as a band built around the 2012 competition winner, and it played the Asan Art Valley Jazz Festival with Jarasum on October 8, 2023. On October 12, 2023 he took part in the first night of a four-day jazz guitar festival at the Tri-Bowl in Songdo, Incheon, with Charlie Jung, Kim Suyu, Park Yoon-woo and Jo Shin-il on a blues and acoustic bill.

His latest project is Vandi (반디), a fusion world-music trio with the daegeum and multi-instrument player Lee Kyung-gu and the percussionist Yoo Byung-wook, in which Jo composes and plays guitar. It brought a programme called "Plastic Island", played partly on instruments made of recycled plastic, to the Namhae Mask Theater Museum on November 1, 2025 and to the Gisan Gugakdang in Sancheong on September 12, 2026.

What is not known: where he was born, who taught him, what he studied beyond the Kyung Hee department, and anything about his early life, because no interview or profile covers it. No release under the name Duck Street has been found.

He is a straight-ahead guitarist with a taste for crossover. The Tenasia review of Attelage places his playing in the bebop line from Charlie Christian, notes a Gypsy-swing turn in the Django Reinhardt cover and points to lyrical writing in "Downfall", "The Sun Rise" and the reading of "Lawns". The Korean Cultural Centre's Budapest announcement says the trio aims to put old sound and modern sound side by side, and a Money Today reviewer of the Berlin show heard Ritenour's softness and Hall's classroom clarity, wild sound breaking out of a gentle touch, and a pop sensibility. From 2017 the trio, the E-Do ensemble and Vandi lean on Korean traditional instruments and scales, which the press calls a Korean sound. In the Ohmynews interview he named world music with ethnic colours and the band Hyukoh as things he would like to work toward.