Juhan Lee (이주한) is a Seoul-based trumpeter, composer and producer who is known in Korean press as Lee Ju-han and bills himself as Juhan Lee on his own albums. He was born on December 20, 1965, and Korean Wikipedia and Wikidata give Seoul as his birthplace, though he grew up in several countries because his father was a diplomat. His career has two halves that overlap. In the 1990s he was one of Seoul's busiest session trumpeters in pop, by his own estimate on 200 to 300 songs, while he made jazz albums of his own: Jikgwan (Intuition, 1995), Gienseng Funk, 10+1 (2001) and the two-disc Miles Song Book (Musikdorf, 2002). Since 2007 he has led Winterplay, a pop-jazz project built on a trumpet and a vocal line that has released albums in Japan and Hong Kong and, in 2022, supplied the music direction for Seoul's International Jazz Day broadcast. He is now 60.

The question of how much of this is jazz is one he raises himself. He told the Sports Seoul newspaper in 2018 that he considered himself a jazz musician first, and in 2010 he told Tenasia that Winterplay is not strictly jazz but music built on a jazz foundation. His records, his festival bookings and his peers' reaction sit on the jazz side; a large share of his credits, and the commercial identity of Winterplay, sit on the pop side. Both are described below.

He spent his childhood abroad. Sports Seoul lists Japan, Burma, Iran, Suriname, New York and Seattle among the places he lived. Press accounts differ on where the trumpet began: the Metro newspaper says he started at 11 in Iran, while Sports Seoul and Tenasia place his first lessons at 12 in Suriname, where his father introduced him to a local player. The Korea Herald adds that at 12 he joined a Latin-jazz-inspired band called Thalamus, whose other members were in their twenties. In the United States he played in marching, big band and orchestral groups in high school and college and was drawn to jazz in high school. The Korea Herald says he took a mechanical engineering degree at the University of Washington, while Korean Wikipedia and Wikidata name Washington State University. Tenasia reports that his father stopped paying his tuition when he chose to study jazz.

He came to Korea to do his military service. Accounts give 1991 (Metro), 1992 (Sports Seoul) or 1993 (Korea Herald). His first session was on an album by Yoon Sang (윤상), whose Part 2 (Jigu Records, 1993) credits him on trumpet, and after his discharge a session on a Kang Su-ji album led to television appearances and a place on the final episode of KBS's Noh Young-sim's Little Concert in 1994. The music director Kang Seung-won then introduced him to the singer Kim Kwang-seok, and Lee played on Kim's "Thirty Something" (서른 즈음에) and other tracks on the same 1994 album, a session Lee says Kang asked him to play with a sad tone. Lee says he and Kim turned out to be distant relatives. Over the next several years his trumpet and flugelhorn appear on records by Lee So-ra (이소라), Shin Seung-hun, Molly, S.E.S. and others, on the saxophonist Lee Jung-sik's Hwadu: The Korean Jazz Standards Vol. 1 (1999), and in film work. The guitarist and music director Lee Byung-woo (이병우) wrote that he first heard Lee's playing while recording the film Mari Iyagi and that Lee's trumpet also appears in six further Korean film scores, among them The King and the Clown (왕의 남자) and Barking Dogs Never Bite (플란다스의 개). Lee remembered the early studio days as hard going, because his Korean was limited and he could not always tell whether a producer's remarks were praise or criticism.

Jazz came alongside the sessions. From 1993 to about 2001 he played Korean jazz clubs four nights a week, and in 1998 and 1999 he helped run the Uljin Jazz Festival, which lost money. Jikgwan (Intuition) appeared in 1995 and is filed as smooth jazz on the Korean service Bugs, with ten tracks that include "Corcovado", "When I Fall in Love", "Days of Wine and Roses" and the Korean folk song "Han Oh Baek Nyun". Lee Byung-woo's note on Miles Song Book counts it as Lee's first jazz album and calls the second, Gienseng Funk, an R&B record; the version listed on Bugs is a 2009 digital release, and when the original appeared is not stated. 10+1 (2001) was a crossover record with fifteen tracks, each crediting a guest singer or player, among them Lee Juck, Kim Hyun-chul (김현철), Jung Jae-hyung (정재형), Noh Young-sim (노영심), the pianist Chung Won-young and Yoonsang. Lee told Sports Seoul he paid for it with about 10 million won earned teaching English and lost about 4 million won on it.

Miles Song Book, released in October 2002 on Musikdorf with a note by Lee Byung-woo, is a two-disc set of 18 tracks made of tunes Miles Davis played, among them "It Never Entered My Mind", "My Funny Valentine", "Stella by Starlight", "Seven Steps to Heaven" and "Oleo". The note says the record lets listeners hear Lee's own feeling and reading of the material, and it values his playing all the more for the scarcity of Korean wind players. Five tracks from it were posted to YouTube in 2024 with the credit Juhan Lee on trumpet and John Hansen on piano; the full personnel is not published. Discogs, Bugs and Lee Byung-woo's note are the only sources found for the record.

Winterplay began in 2007. Lee told Sports Seoul it started as a three-month trial built on trumpet melodies and a vocalist, and Tenasia says it grew out of session players with little work and a plan for a single Christmas album. He recruited the singer Moon Hye-won (혜원, who performs as Haewon) after seeing her at a jazz club, and Fluxus Music signed the project. The 2010 line-up on Tenasia is Lee, Moon, the guitarist Choi Woo-joon and the bassist So Eun-kyu, with no drums, partly for budget reasons. Choco Snow Ball came out on January 23, 2008 and, Lee told Sports Seoul, topped Korea's jazz chart and the jazz charts of iTunes Japan and Hong Kong. "Happy Bubble" became the theme of a Samsung washing-machine advertisement. A deal with Universal Music Japan followed, and Songs of Colored Love (2009), Sunshines (Japan, February 2010; Hong Kong, 2011) and later Two Fabulous Fools (2013) were issued abroad. Tenasia reported in 2010 that a British review of the group's UK showcase gave an album four stars out of five and compared the vocals to Pink Martini. Korean Wikipedia lists dates at Billboard Live in Tokyo and Osaka in November 2009, the MAC Jazz Festival in Korea in October 2009, the Sapporo International Jazz Festival in July 2011, the Hong Kong Summer Jazz Festival in May 2011 and the Chilpo International Jazz Festival in August 2013. In February 2014 "Shake It Up and Down" reached number one on the international chart of Hong Kong's Commercial Radio, and on April 6, 2014 the group gave its Nonstop Jazz Fever concert at the LG Arts Center in Seoul. Lee compared Winterplay to Michael Bublé, Norah Jones and Steely Dan, popular artists with jazz roots, in a 2014 interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily.

Around the band he kept a wider working life. In 2012 he hosted the English-language Music Access on Arirang Radio, he is credited as producer and trumpeter on the vocal album Nouveau Son (2003, With33Music) and as co-producer of one track on Dynamic Duo's Double Dynamite (2005), and he supplied the music for the 2015 MBC drama Angry Mom, including a big-band jazz piece. Discogs also credits him on records by Dynamic Duo, Asoto Union, CB Mass, Clazziquai Project, Woong San and Yiruma.

In October 2017 Winterplay became a one-man project under Lee, as the Seoul Economic Daily reported; Lee told Sports Seoul that the other members wanted to pursue other music. The new phase added jazz rap, which he began trying at 50. "Es Tu Vida" (October 19, 2017, with the singer Grace) set a rap about a jazz musician's life over a bossa nova rhythm, and the EP All About Love followed in December 2017. Jazz Cookin' (March 6, 2019) is a ten-track album with remakes of "Take Five", "Imagine", "What a Wonderful World" and "Love Me Tender", the first of them with rap lyrics Lee wrote about his own story. In 2018 he also recorded "Namu" for a Kim Kwang-seok tribute LP, Kim Kwang-seok, Again. On April 28, 2022 the Korea JoongAng Daily announced that the production company Loudpigs, with Seoul Metropolitan City, would stream Soul of Seoul Celebrates International Jazz Day 2022 at noon on April 30 on the VisitSeoul TV channel, with Lee as co-host and music director and a new piece, "Gganbu (067 & 240)", inspired by the Netflix series Squid Game and featuring the haegum. The two Gganbu singles, from April and May 2022, are his latest releases found.

There is no published account of a teacher or mentor, and no interview in which he names the players who shaped his trumpet sound.

He describes his work in terms of popular music with a jazz skeleton. In 2014 he told the Korea JoongAng Daily that few artists in Korea work in the gap between jazz and pop, and in a 2014 Korea Herald interview he named Louis Armstrong as the model for using jazz as a way into popular music. Early Winterplay is vocal, melody-led and Latin-inflected, with bossa nova, cha-cha and samba rhythms, English and Korean lyrics, a Michael Jackson cover ("Billie Jean") and jazz readings of pop songs. The sound is deliberately light. The 2010 Tenasia interview describes a band without drums in which the bass carries the melody, and British reviewers likened it to lounge music.

His own albums are more conventional. Miles Song Book is a trumpet and piano reading of repertoire associated with Miles Davis and played in a relaxed, ballad-friendly manner, and Jikgwan mixes American standards with a Korean folk melody. Bugs files 10+1 as crossover, contemporary and fusion jazz.

Where he sits in jazz is contested, and he knows it. In 2018 he said that critics and musicians often dismissed pop-jazz as a cover for weak trumpet technique, and that he coined the term "K-jazz". Apple Music files the 2008 to 2010 Winterplay albums under K-Pop, Discogs tags them Jazz with Pop, smooth jazz and vocal styles, and Bugs lists his solo records and Winterplay under jazz and ballad. The festival bookings, the jazz magazine compilations that carry Winterplay tracks (Rainbow, Jazzpeople, 2009 and 2011) and the Jazz Day assignment point to a place in the Korean jazz world; the long list of pop sessions and television soundtracks points the other way.