JSFA (즈스파) is a Seoul-based jazz-funk band whose name stands for Jazz Snobs, Funk Addicts. It is co-led by the pianist and keyboardist Jiyoung Lee (이지영), who wrote and arranged every track of its second album except one cover, and the bassist Eunchang Choi (최은창). The notes to its first album date the band to the spring of 2008, and Korean press coverage of its 2026 festival booking gives the same year. It has released two albums, a self-titled debut in 2009 and Season 2: The Return of JSFA!! in December 2013, plus a nine-minute single, "Sketchy," in October 2016, and it has kept playing clubs, halls and festivals across Korea for well over a decade.

According to the notes released with the debut, the band began when players who had long shared Seoul stages decided to form a real band rather than a one-off project: the saxophonist Jeesok Kim (김지석), Lee, Choi and the drummer Sangmin Lee (이상민), who was widening his range from funk playing into jazz. It started as an electric jazz-funk quartet built on members' own compositions and steady club work. In early 2009 Sangmin Lee left to study in the United States, and the drummer Seungho Kim (김승호), a specialist in funk and black gospel, took his place. The trumpeter Sunyong Bae (배선용), named a Rising Star by the magazine Jazz People in 2009, and the guitarist Jaewon Jung (정재원) joined soon afterward, and the saxophonist 손성제 sat in as a guest.

Lee and Choi had already spent years abroad. Both studied jazz at the University of North Texas, where Lee was the only Korean pianist in the One O'Clock Lab Band, and both then toured the United States in 2004 and 2005 with trumpeter Maynard Ferguson's Big Bop Nouveau Band. Lee told All About Jazz in 2014 that she had studied statistics at Korea University before turning to jazz, that she and Choi were married before they went to Texas, and that the clubs she found on her return to Seoul were often places where people talked through the music. She also leads the Lee Jiyoung Trio and an acoustic quartet, and her own albums Confession (2006) and Closer to You (2010) preceded the band's second record; Closer to You won her the best-pianist vote in the Jazz People readers' poll.

Jazz Snobs, Funk Addicts came out in the autumn of 2009 on the band's own JazzSnobs Records. Its ten pieces are all originals: five by Lee, two by Kim, two by Choi and one credited to Lee and the band. Choi's liner note, dated September 2009, says the group recorded the way it played in clubs, with drums, bass, keyboard and guitar set in a circle, amplifiers miked and bleeding into one another's microphones, the horns in booths, and almost no overdubbing, and that many takes were thrown away over small mistakes. The band chose not to sign a distribution deal and sold the record at its shows and through a specialist jazz shop. Lee has recalled that the group had played together for less than a year before recording and was still finding its sound; a couple of pieces use three horns, with 손성제 as guest on "Carla." Korean television's EBS Space Gonggam also filmed the six-piece of that period.

The first lineup did not hold. The alto saxophonist left, Seungho Kim was called up for military service, and Lee has said the band stopped playing for about two and a half years while she tried substitute drummers and then decided to rebuild it as her own band, with herself as leader. Kim returned from service in the first half of 2013. The saxophonist Dongwook Lee (이동욱), who studied in New York, joined, the trumpeter Junghyun Cho (조정현) took the trumpet chair, and Jung stayed on guitar. Both horn players and Jung, Lee said, had a lot of experience in Korea's pop scene, and Jung was her former student.

Season 2: The Return of JSFA!! was released on December 11, 2013, with eleven tracks and about an hour of music. The singer Shinae An Wheeler (안신애) guests on three of them, among them the Beatles cover "Come Together" and the Korean-language "Trust Issue." According to the album's notes the band played material from it at the opening concert of LIG Hapjeong Hall in April 2013 and at the Jarasum International Jazz Festival that October, and in February 2014 the ONSTAGE series posted a filmed session of the title track "Four Jackets." Ian Patterson reviewed the album for All About Jazz on March 15, 2014, hearing a group whose four years of stage work had brought tighter ensemble playing and a confident identity, and placing it among the leading names in jazz-funk. Lee told him that Jarasum was one of the best places a Korean jazz musician can play and that she had already played it twice with JSFA.

The next release, the single "Sketchy," followed on October 4, 2016, three years after the album. It runs about nine minutes and moves through improvisation, a ballad stretch, hard funk grooves and touches of soul and hip-hop; a one-take live video posted the day before credits Lee, Choi, Dongwook Lee, Cho, Kim and Jung. Performance listings fill in much of what came after. The band was booked for the Seogwipo Arts Center on Jeju on August 5, 2017, billed as its first Jeju concert, and played the Chilpo Jazz Festival on September 22, 2017. In March 2018 it was billed with the pianist Song Young-ju at the CJ x Berklee Music Concert at CJ Azit Gwangheungchang, and a concert in the Gwangmyeong Cultural Foundation's "Taste of Jazz" series was billed for May 27, 2020, with socially distanced seating and the singer-songwriter Choyoung (초영) as guest vocalist. A spring concert followed at the Munhwa Jeongwon Art Hall on May 25, 2024. The hall's announcement named the guitarist Jukjae (적재), the singer-songwriter who is Jaewon Jung under his birth name, and Seungho Kim, whom it called a session drummer for the singer IU, among the band's members, and listed the drummer 황성환, the guitarist 조영덕 and Choyoung as that evening's additions.

In 2026 JSFA is still working. It was booked at All That Jazz in Seoul on October 8 and for the 23rd Jarasum Jazz Festival, which ran from October 9 to 11 on Jarasum island in Gapyeong. Sports Kyunghyang's English edition called it a leading Korean jazz band and placed it on the last day, October 11, with the Armenian pianist Tigran Hamasyan; the festival ended on schedule. JazzNode lists the JSFA set for 7:00 p.m. that evening, with Lee, Choi, Dongwook Lee, Cho, Kim, the alto saxophonist Hachul Song (송하철) and the guitarist Dongmin Kim in the lineup. A date at Club Evans in Seoul is listed for November 11, 2026.

JSFA plays electric jazz-funk with jazz harmony and solos at the center. Lee described the recipe to All About Jazz: the harmony comes from traditional jazz and classical music, with Ravel a favorite, and the rhythms come from hip-hop and R&B. She named the funkier records of Herbie Hancock, Roy Hargrove's RH Factor and D'Angelo as the grooves she wanted to bring to jazz. Her acoustic album Closer to You includes a piece by Bill Evans and an arrangement of "Let It Be" in which she hears the influence of Brad Mehldau.

Patterson's review hears the jazz-funk tradition of Hancock and Bob James in her keyboard writing, staccato keyboard dabs in the manner of Hiromi, guitar lines recalling John Scofield and Scott Henderson, a keyboard solo that owes something to Jan Hammer, horn writing with the intensity of James Brown, a turn into jazz-metal at the end of "Not Yet" and the hard-bop feel of 1960s Blue Note on "Wannabe Funky Blues." Bugs tags Season 2 as acid jazz and jazz-funk. The group works with vocal guests and bends pop songs, among them Beatles tunes, to its own style, and its members also play sessions for Korean pop acts, but its albums, festival bookings and press coverage all place it in the jazz scene.