Jung-Jae Kim (김정제) is a South Korean tenor saxophonist, composer and improviser who is based in Berlin. His releases and his Discogs entry bill him as Jung-Jae Kim, and the Relative Pitch page for his album Shamanism files the same record under Kim Jung Jae, which Discogs lists as a name variation. The Hangul spelling comes from his own YouTube channel and from the Seoul concert series that presented him. No source gives his birth date, his birthplace or where he studied, and none says in which year he moved to Berlin. His own notes for Shamanism describe the Korean peninsula as the homeland of his birth, growth and belonging, and his website, his channel, the Relative Pitch release notes, Squidco and Salt Peanuts all call him South Korean.

The earliest recording in his discography is Gate1, free improvisation for tenor saxophone, clarinet, guitar and electronics made with the guitarist Jun Kim at Studio A of the Grieg Academy in Bergen, Norway, on July 6, 2018. The release note calls it a meeting of two South Korean musicians in Bergen; it appeared as a digital album in November 2019. Back in Korea that December 23 he recorded the first album of The JJ Motion, the project band he leads, with Jun Kim on guitar and electronics and the drummer Sunki Kim. Trio (June 2019) is free improvisation throughout. A second album, Sound Breaking, recorded at Tune Up Studio in January 2019 with the bassist Eungsuk Lee added, was mixed and mastered by Iver Sandøy at Solslottet Studio and only reached Bandcamp in September 2022, where its notes speak of an "ugly beauty" that comes from unconventional playing. Expressions, recorded at Tune Up Studio on August 8, 2019 with a second guitarist, Hyunwoo Lee, moved the other way: every player has a fixed role, written by Kim, and the parts are meant to interlock into one sound. His Bandcamp pages quote Heejun Kim of the Korean site MMJazz on Trio and MinGaph SeoJeong of Jazz People on Sound Breaking. The band was filmed in Seoul that summer at the venue Mudaeruk on July 6, at Ghetto Alive on July 12 and at the CJ Azit on July 28.

In 2020 his work moved toward Scandinavia and the label Creative Sources, run in Lisbon by the violist Ernesto Rodrigues. PAN's debut I Had a Dream (Creative Sources, July 2020) was recorded at Studio Glasfågeln in Sweden on March 11, 2020 and produced by Rodrigues. Kim composed all of it, using graphic signs and words rather than notation, for tenor saxophone, the guitarists Vít Beneš and Joel Haag, the qanun player Shafeeq Alsadi and the kamancheh player Farshad Saremi. In the autumn of 2020 he formed the trio MØ:SAN in Bergen with the cellist Finlay Hare and the drummer Amund Nordstrøm; the name joins the Korean words 뫼 and 산, both meaning mountain, with an Ø that marks where the group began. Its album Mr. Mountain's Folktales was recorded at the Grieg Academy in June 2021, mixed and mastered in Sweden by Gustav Davidsson, and released by AMP Music & Records on January 27, 2023, with all the compositions and the production credited to Kim. Discogs also credits a saxophonist named Jung-Jae Kim on Tempest Fugues, the Water Music vinyl album recorded in 2020 at Stein Rokkans Hus in Bergen and issued by Musicwelike Records in March 2023.

Korean stages still presented him by name in 2021. On September 24 the GhettoAlive Jazz Project in Seoul staged Absolute Oblivion, billed with sound and music by Kim and live animation by Syed Hasan Abbas. On November 8 the online series Stellive presented The JJ Motion in a studio concert named for Mr. Mountain's Folktales, billed with Jun Kim and Hyunwoo Lee on guitars and Eungsuk Lee on bass, and on December 11 the group played 투영 (Projection) in the Suchang Cheongchun Theatre series, a set built around edited and distorted images of the sea.

By June 2023 he was recording in Berlin. Taedong (Creative Sources CS 794), cut on June 13 at Studiobörne45, is a quartet with Rodrigues on viola, his son Guilherme Rodrigues on cello and the drummer Quentin Cholet. Chess Music (CS 801) is a 41-minute live set recorded at the Werkhalle Wiesenburg on September 24, 2023, with the trumpeter Axel Dörner, Guilherme Rodrigues and the percussionist Stephen Flinn. On August 14, 2023 he took three South Korean musicians into Tune-Up Studio, the saxophonist Sunjae Lee and the drummers Junyoung Song and Sunki Kim, to record Shamanism; Davidsson mixed it in Sweden in September 2023. The trio TriJJo, with the guitarist Joel Haag and the drummer Henrik Wartel, recorded Conversations with Snow in Göteborg on November 9, 2023; six of its ten pieces are Kim's compositions and four are free improvisations.

The Creative Sources catalogue then grew quickly. On March 11, 2024 he recorded 5 in the Afternoon in Berlin with the Rodrigues pair, the electronic musician Eric Bauer and Flinn. At the label's CreativeFest in Lisbon on November 24, 2024 he played in a trio with Rodrigues and the bassist Alvaro Rosso (Meari: Instant Waves) and in the large Isotope Ensemble (Caesium). Three weeks earlier, on November 1, 2024, he had recorded Quark in Berlin with Flinn and the alto saxophonist and flautist Sylvain Monchocé. October 2025 brought two more sessions in Berlin, Crossing the Floor with the 5 in the Afternoon group and Points of Dichotomy with the Rodrigues pair and the guitarist Andreas Willers, and on March 22, 2026 the same quartet recorded Fragments of the Unseen.

Shamanism appeared on Relative Pitch Records on June 20, 2025 as RPR1230, and it is the first album issued under his own name. It is a quartet of horns and drums, two saxophones and two drum sets, and its twelve pieces are named by Korean ideograms and follow the phases of a shamanic ceremony. Eyal Hareuveni wrote about it for Salt Peanuts in June 2025, hearing a raw, primal and ritual language that links ancient Eastern sound to Afro-American and European free music. Christopher Laws at Culturedarm heard Evan Parker in the opening piece. Andrey Henkin's review for The Squid's Ear, dated February 26, 2026, called it some of the best free improvisation he had ever heard, controlled, precise and disciplined across nearly 80 minutes. His website says Henkin also named it one of the top ten releases of 2025 in JazzTimes. In Berlin he has built a live version, the Shamanism 4tet, with Chris Heenan on soprano saxophone and contrabass clarinet, Andreas Voccia on synthesizer and Marcello S. Busato on drums, which the Free Jazz Collective showed in a video of a late September 2025 set at Kühlspot Social Club.

Outside the recordings, his website says he co-organizes Nexus, a Berlin series for experimental and intermedia performance, and that he has composed for film and interdisciplinary media, including the score for Eliza Petkova's Silent Observers, for which it lists live-music premiere screenings in Sofia on February 27, 2026 and in Plovdiv on February 28, 2026. It says his work has been supported by the CJ Cultural Foundation and the Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation, and it names Rodrigues, Dörner, the Korean trumpeter Sunbae Choi, Richard Scott, Matthias Bauer, Willers and Alexander Frangenheim among his collaborators. The site lists Berlin dates through December 12, 2026, including a film screening with live music on November 3 and a duo with the contrabassist Alexander Frangenheim on December 11 and 12. In July and August 2026 it shows dates in Seoul and Jeonju: a trio set at Amenohi Coffee on August 16 with Yeji Kim on haegeum and Cholet on drums, a Dotolim concert in Seoul on July 31 with Yoo Hong on daegeum and Jin Sangtae on electronics, and a solo set at Froggy Office in Jeonju on August 1. The Dotolim series is the one whose earlier videos carry his Hangul name.

His Korean basis, then, is documented in three ways: the stated origin and the Hangul name, a run of Seoul recordings and concerts from 2018 to 2021, and returns since, including the Seoul sessions for Shamanism in 2023 and the summer 2026 dates. Since 2023 his work has been based mostly in Berlin and issued mostly by European labels.

His own description of the music is free improvisation as a way of speaking through the body and the instrument: breath, voice, silence and the physical materials of the saxophone shaped into a personal language. Across his releases the balance between freedom and structure changes by project. Trio is entirely improvised; Expressions gives each player a fixed part; PAN and MØ:SAN work from graphic scores of lines, symbols and sketches; TriJJo mixes written themes with improvised pieces. The notes to Shamanism say the music was inspired by Korean monochrome painting, sketching a world in dots, lines and brushstrokes of sound, and that its horns-and-drums line-up strips the music to its core.

Critics place the sound in the European and American free tradition. Christopher Laws of Culturedarm compared the opening of Shamanism to Evan Parker's Horizons Held Close (Relative Pitch) and heard the closing passage of "Sang" call up Albert Ayler. Andrey Henkin ended his review by saying that anyone who believes Ayler's declaration that music is the healing force of the universe will need the album. Eyal Hareuveni stressed how the record turns a ritual idea into spiritual free jazz, and a review from The Poison Pie Publishing House quoted by Kim calls it undeniably Korean and global at once. Within the Creative Sources sessions the writing is quieter and more spatial: the label's notes describe Quark as a trio that walks cautiously into silence, and Ken Waxman of Jazzword compared Chess Music to the hushed concentration of a chess match.

His collaborations also bring Korean instruments into free improvisation, whether the kamancheh and qanun of PAN, the daegeum of the Berlin series Where the River Meets the Sea and of his Seoul dates, or the haegeum in the Seoul trio of August 2026. Film scoring and intermedia performance sit beside the records, and both are improvisation-led.