John Lee is a multi-instrumentalist who became a first-call bassist on the Vancouver and Victoria jazz scene and then, with his second album, a pianist-leader. He was born in Seoul, South Korea, in June 1993, and his family emigrated to Canada in 1998, when he was five, settling in Nanaimo, British Columbia. He has led two albums for Cellar Music, The Artist (2022), on which he plays only bass, and Second Wind (2024), a piano trio date with Peter Washington and Kenny Washington. He has lived in Victoria since about 2017 and works in both Victoria and Vancouver. Not to be confused with John Lee, the American bassist born in Boston in 1952, who has a separate profile.

Lee has said that the family's move was partly meant to spare him and his brother the competitive Korean school system. Music was already part of the house: his mother started him on piano lessons soon after the move, his brother played violin, and he followed the Suzuki method and Royal Conservatory exams through the end of high school. He found jazz in his teens, and at his father's suggestion left his school in Grade 10 for the jazz program at Wellington Secondary in Nanaimo under the teacher Carmella Luvisotto, graduating in 2010. His application to Berklee College of Music, he recalls, included everything he had recorded: a high-school pop-punk band, bass and guitar tracks, singer-songwriter material and jazz drumming.

He went to Boston at 17 on the Gary Slaight scholarship, a full award given each year to one Canadian student; he was its third recipient. He arrived with the Korean drummer JK Kim, who became a close friend, and both skipped a grade to get there. Drums were his principal instrument at Berklee, where, by his own account, he learned upright bass and jazz piano with no earlier experience on either. His biography names Ralph Peterson Jr. and Dave Santoro as mentors there and says he made his American performing debut at 19 with the pianist Cyrus Chestnut at Dizzy's Club in New York. He graduated in 2016.

Back in British Columbia, Lee says he "fell into" bass because people kept hiring him for it. His first bass work came through the Victoria drummer Kelby MacNayr, who brought American visitors to the city, among them the pianists George Colligan, Larry Fuller (the last pianist for Ray Brown) and Misha Piatigorsky. Soon after he met the saxophonist and label owner Cory Weeds, and his first official Weeds engagement was a quintet date in 2017 or 2018. His biography says that since 2017 he has played in Vancouver with visiting players including Grant Stewart, Jeremy Pelt, Peter Bernstein, Benny Benack III, Terell Stafford, Ralph Moore, Eric Alexander, Joe Farnsworth and Mike LeDonne. Earlier it lists work with the Canadian pianist Phil Dwyer and with the trumpeter Ingrid Jensen. He also teaches, and described leading a jazz camp near Victoria every year.

His first records were as a sideman for Cellar's labels: bass on the Jerry Cook Quartet + album Walk In The Park (2020) and on the Cory Weeds Quartet's Just Coolin' (2022), a live-in-the-studio date recorded on September 15, 2021, with Jesse Cahill on drums. Weeds also proposed that Lee's own first record should be a bass record, and arranged a session with the drummer Carl Allen and the pianist Eric Reed. A cancelled flight and pandemic restrictions kept the Knoxville-based Reed from travelling to Vancouver, and the Vancouver pianist Miles Black took his place. The Artist was recorded on October 24, 2021 at Pineapple Sound in Langley, British Columbia, with Weeds on tenor saxophone for three of its eight tracks, and came out in May 2022. It mixes pieces by Mulgrew Miller, Benny Green and Joshua Redman with two of Lee's own, a ballad called "Life Is a Beautiful Thing" and the title track, which he wrote for his father, Jae, who passed away in 2014. Jim Hynes, reviewing it for Making a Scene, found it thoroughly mainstream in approach but praised Lee's command of the jazz vocabulary and his relaxed, swinging time.

In 2024 he moved to piano as leader. Second Wind was recorded in one day, December 18, 2023, at Monarch Studios in Vancouver, with Peter Washington and Kenny Washington, a rhythm section Lee has called his favorite since he was 19. It has ten pieces, including the originals "Second Wind" and "Widow's Remorse," and was released on July 5, 2024; Lee dedicated it to his mother, Hyun Joo Lee, who passed away unexpectedly in January 2023. Pierre Giroux of All About Jazz praised its swing and its mix of vigor and intimacy, and Sam Dickinson of The WholeNote described the piano playing as ambitious and intimate. He named Benny Green and Bill Charlap as the pianists behind his style.

Lee's other recent credits are on organ and as a guest. He plays Hammond B-3 organ on guitarist Mike Clement's Hittin' It! (2024), recorded in New Orleans in May 2023 with Herlin Riley on drums. In January 2024 he guested at the piano for one track, Kenny Barron's "Song for Abdullah," on drummer Carl Allen's Tippin' (released January 10, 2025), recorded at Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, with Christian McBride on bass and Chris Potter on reeds. He returned to bass on Cory Weeds Meets Jerry Weldon, recorded October 28, 2024 and released in 2025. On the road, his piano trio with the bassist Kosma Busheikin and the drummer Graham Villette played the Salmon Arm Jazz Club on May 23, 2024 and was billed at Hermann's Jazz Club in Victoria on August 14, 2024.

Lee plays straight-ahead, swinging jazz in the hard bop and mainstream tradition. His own description of Second Wind is blunt about it: do not expect innovation, he writes, just swinging hard with intricacy. The label's notes for The Artist list Christian McBride and Ray Brown as his primary influences on bass, and one of his regular projects is called In the Spirit of Ray Brown. On piano he points to Benny Green and Bill Charlap.

He is open about how he came to the instruments. He says he never took a bass lesson, does not necessarily consider himself a bass player, and calls drums his real passion, adding that what matters is what you communicate through the instrument. Reviewers heard a player at ease on each of them: Giroux noted that on Second Wind he plays "Moonlight in Vermont" in an arrangement by Ahmad Jamal, with single lines in the upper register, stop-and-start tempos and space, and The WholeNote observed that his piano does not sound like a bassist's piano, just as his bass on The Artist does not sound like a drummer's.