John Chin (full name John Kyobin Chin) is a pianist, composer and educator who was born in Seoul, South Korea, on February 10, 1976, raised in Los Angeles and has worked in New York since 1998. He leads his own trios and quintets, has recorded for Fresh Sound New Talent and bjurecords, and in fall 2026 was named Director of the Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance Program at Columbia University. No Hangul spelling of his name has been published in any source found.

He was raised in Los Angeles by his mother, whom he describes in a 2021 JazzTimes essay as a Korean immigrant who crossed the 38th parallel as a child, became an American citizen and brought him up as a single mother in the 1980s. He began on the piano at four. At fourteen he entered California State University's early entrance program for gifted students, where he began studying jazz, and he took his bachelor's degree in music at nineteen. Around Los Angeles he was influenced by local players, among them the drummer Billy Higgins and the pianist Dorothy Donegan, and he has said that as a teenager he got to spend time with Donegan and watch what she did with her hands. He then spent about a year and a half at the University of North Texas, working the Dallas and Fort Worth scene, before moving to the New York area. He earned a master of music degree at Rutgers University, studying with Kenny Barron, and later an Artist Diploma at the Juilliard School.

In New York he led a working trio, and an older biography on Jazz.com lists work with Joe Chambers, Norah Jones and Mark Turner; the same biography names as his trio's sidemen Gregory Hutchinson, the bassist Ugonna Okegwo and Joel Frahm, and mentions his European debut. His own biographies add Ron Carter, Benny Golson, Dayna Stephens, Chris Cheek, Ari Hoenig, Donny McCaslin, Gregory Tardy, Jaimeo Brown, Irvin Mayfield, John Ellis, Rudy Royston, Terrell Stafford and Marcus and E.J. Strickland to the list of musicians he has shared stages with. He keeps a teaching studio in Brooklyn's Prospect Park neighborhood, and a Korean Cultural Center New York listing for a January 15, 2016 quintet concert at Flushing Town Hall, part of Carnegie Hall's Neighborhood Concerts, introduced him as a pianist born in Seoul and grown up in Los Angeles.

His first album as a leader, Blackout Conception (Fresh Sound New Talent, FSNT 292), was recorded in New York in 2005 and released in 2007, with Mark Turner on tenor saxophone for four of its seven tracks, the bassists Alexis Cuadrado and Chris Higgins and the drummer Bill Campbell. AllMusic's Michael G. Nastos judged it a thoughtful, enjoyable debut that placed Chin among a generation of pianists that included Aaron Goldberg, Aaron Parks, Robert Glasper and Danny Grissett. The trio album Undercover (bjurecords, 2014) followed, with Orlando le Fleming on bass and Dan Rieser on drums; it was recorded in May 2010 in one room in Brooklyn, with no edits and arrangements worked out over years of gigs, and it reworks Duke Ellington's "Caravan", John Coltrane's "Countdown" and Wayne Shorter's "Edda" and "Fall" alongside his own pieces.

Sideman work ran alongside. He recorded with the saxophonist Gregory Tardy on With Songs of Joy (SteepleChase, 2015), a quintet date with the trumpeter Philip Dizack, the bassist Sean Conly and the drummer Jaimeo Brown, and with Irvin Mayfield on the seven-disc New Orleans Jazz Playhouse set (Basin Street Records, 2015). Songs After Hours (Albany Records, 2015), billed to the soprano Mary MacKenzie and Chin, presents jazz arrangements of songs the composer John Harbison wrote between 1952 and 2007; Dayna Stephens played saxophone, Joe Martin bass and Dan Rieser drums. His most visible sideman post came with the singer René Marie, whose all-original album Sound of Red (Motéma, 2016), with Chin on piano, was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album at the 2017 ceremony. He toured with her, and JazzTimes calls him a Grammy-nominated pianist.

Fifth (independently released, November 2016) is a quintet record with the saxophonists Stacy Dillard and Tivon Pennicott, the bassist Spencer Murphy and the drummer Lawrence Leathers, and a number of its tracks, per the release notes, are free improvisations. In 2021 he released Anything Mose! with the singer-songwriter Richard Julian, a tribute to Mose Allison; DownBeat's Joshua Myers found the performances faithful to the originals without being dull imitations and the partnership cohesive. The pair met on the New York club scene, and NPR's Jazz Night in America devoted a June 2022 episode to the band. Chin also produced and played on the Anything Mose! track "The Way of the World" for the 2019 Fat Possum tribute album If You're Going to the City. A live pandemic-era recording with Jaimeo Brown and Sean Conly, Sun of Music: Live From the Lockdown, appeared in November 2023. Other sideman dates include the saxophonist Keith Loftis's Original State (Long Tone Music, 2021), with Willie Jones III on drums; Reggie Quinerly's New York Nowhere (Redefinition Music, 2021); Patrick Cornelius's Infinite Blue (Whirlwind Recordings, 2013), with Jeff Ballard on drums; the singer Svetlana Shmulyian's Night at the Movies (Starr Records, 2019); and Lauren Henderson's La Bruja (Terasima Records).

Journey of Han (Jinsy Records, September 27, 2024) is his most personal record. He recorded it in Brooklyn on January 20 and 21, 2024, two days after premiering the new music at The Jazz Gallery on January 18, with a trio of the bassist Jeong Lim Yang and the drummer Jongkuk Kim; The Jazz Gallery billed the group as his all Korean New York trio. He has said the title draws on han, a Korean idea that holds sorrow, resentment, resilience, longing, loss and release, and that the album comes from more than 25 years as a Korean American in New York, from the community he found in jazz and from the racism he met along the way. The 14 tracks include "ATL", "Midnight Sun", "The Constant Foreigner", a drum feature for Kim called "Loom", and the standards "Never Let Me Go" and "Lush Life", closing with a solo "Stardust". Paris-Move's Thierry De Clemensat put it among his essentials, and O's Place Jazz gave it 76 points, praising "ATL", "Midnight Sun" and "Never Let Me Go".

He teaches as well as plays. Columbia Music announced him as Director of the Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance Program, beginning in fall 2026, and a fall 2026 course listing shows him as the instructor of a jazz ensemble section. Before that he taught at Long Island University's Roc Nation School of Music in Brooklyn and as a teaching artist with Carnegie Hall; German Wikipedia says that since 2013 he has worked in a Carnegie Hall program with incarcerated people and with young mothers in hospitals.

His website describes a pianist who draws on jazz, pop and Western classical traditions, and quotes critics who hear fast, Tatum-like runs and independent hands on standards, intimate and abstract passages, a bluesy streak, and a confident vulnerability. His own account of his musical development points to Kenny Barron as the mentor who shaped him, to the Los Angeles players Billy Higgins and Dorothy Donegan, and to a polyphonic approach, improvising several lines at once, which he says he saw Donegan demonstrate, read about in the playing of Keith Jarrett, and heard in Brad Mehldau; he also points to Art Tatum and Erroll Garner, who would run a counter line through the middle of everything else going on.

On Undercover he treats every tune, his own compositions included, as a frame for improvisation. Fifth adds a quintet and free improvisation, Anything Mose! goes to the blues and wit of Mose Allison, Songs After Hours to a classical composer's song cycle, and Journey of Han to personal composition within a piano trio.

Scope is clear: Discogs files his leader releases under Jazz, with Post Bop and Contemporary Jazz styles on Journey of Han and Undercover, and no competing popular-music identity is documented.