Jung Sung-jo (정성조, also romanized Jeong Seong-jo and, on his big band records, Sungjo Jung) was a South Korean saxophonist, flautist, arranger, composer and bandleader who passed away on October 26, 2014, at the age of 68. Korean newspapers called him a first-generation jazz musician, and Berklee College of Music believes he was the first Korean student to enroll there, in 1979. His career ran on three tracks at once: film and pop music, where he wrote about 40 to 50 scores and led the KBS orchestra for roughly a decade; jazz education, where he helped found the practical music department of the Seoul Institute of the Arts, which Korean press calls the country's first; and jazz playing, in Seoul clubs and, late in life, on big band albums. The records released under his own name from the 1970s and 1980s are mostly film soundtracks and disco-era albums, which Discogs files largely under funk, soul and pop. The straight jazz records come after 2010, so the case for him as a jazz musician rests on his club work, his teaching and his big band writing as much as on his early discography.

He was born on April 8, 1946; no source found gives his birthplace. According to a 2009 TenAsia interview he learned music near a U.S. military base in the 1950s, starting on piano, and Seoul High School knew him as a jazz talent. Obituaries in the Korean press say he took up the saxophone at Seoul Middle School and, as a high school student in the 1960s, played with a U.S. Eighth Army band. In the 2009 interview he says he began professionally before finishing school as a flautist with the composer Gil Ok-yoon, worked with him for six years and toured with the singer Patti Kim. He then studied composition at Seoul National University, where in 1968 he won a silver prize at the national college jazz festival. His earliest performing credit on Discogs is Kim Min-ki (김민기)'s debut album of 1971, on which he is credited as arranger and plays flute and saxophone on four tracks; Korean Wikipedia says his quartet accompanied the singer.

In the 1970s he led Jung Sung-jo and the Messengers, which obituaries in Korean newspapers describe as Korea's first brass-rock group. Its records were two film soundtrack LPs on Shin Segye Record, 어제 내린 비 (It Rained Yesterday, 1975) and 영자의 全盛時代 (Yeong-ja's Heyday, 1976), with the trumpeter Choi Sun Bae in the horn section on both. Korean Wikipedia and Discogs say he made his debut as a film music director on the 1974 film It Rained Yesterday, writing the title song that the singer Yoon Hyung-joo recorded, and in 1977 he scored Winter Woman (겨울여자), which TenAsia says drew about one million viewers.

In 1979, finding the Korean market limiting, he went to Berklee, a school he had first seen advertised in Down Beat while still in high school; Berklee says he was touring the United States as a backing musician for Korean singers when he decided to enroll. He earned a degree in professional music by 1983, and TenAsia says he returned to Seoul that autumn. Berklee's account adds that he brought back the first copy of the Real Book that Korean musicians had seen, and that it was widely copied. He names Greg Hopkins, Barry Nettles, Phil Wilson and Bill Pierce among his teachers there. Back in Korea he wrote more film music, including Deep Blue Night (깊고 푸른 밤, soundtrack LP 1985), which he called his favorite, and the baseball film Lee Jang-ho's Baseball Team (soundtrack LP 1986), and he served as music director for Korean productions of musicals including West Side Story, Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita.

In the late 1980s he helped build the practical music department at the Seoul Institute of the Arts (서울예술대학); sources give 1987, 1988 and 1989 as the year it opened, and Berklee says he taught the first jazz theory courses there in 1988. He left teaching in 1995 to conduct the KBS Orchestra, a post he held for about ten years that included television programs such as Open Concert and Big Show, and he went back to the Institute in 2005. In 2009 he received the Jecheon International Music & Film Festival's film music award. Through those years he kept playing: the TenAsia interview says he had appeared at the Seoul club All That Jazz for 27 years, and the notes to his 2013 album say he played the Cheongdam-dong club Once in a Blue Moon every Friday night for almost ten years. The Seoul Shinmun's September 2000 profile of the drummer Choi Se-jin names him, with Gil Ok-yoon, as a co-founder of the Korea Jazz Association; the article gives no dates.

His own jazz records came late. Sungjo Jung Big Band In New York (2010) collects arrangements his Seoul Institute of the Arts big band class had played for years, offered in his liner note to young players and arrangers, and a Korean newspaper reported in July 2010 on a big band concert at Seoul's Drama Center that played much of the same repertoire. By November 2011 a Jeonbuk newspaper described him as a research professor at the City University of New York, and he took a master's degree at Queens College. There he recorded Jung Sungjo Big Band In New York-2 (2013) with the Queens College big band and its trumpet professor Mike Mossman, adding a piece, "Seoul Express", that he wrote to mark his year and a half in New York. A quartet album, All That Jazz, lists four other musicians on its sleeve and is on streaming services in a 2022 release; its recording date is not given in the sources found.

He retired from the Seoul Institute of the Arts in 2011. In his last years he headed the practical music department at the Seoul School of Integrated Arts (서울종합예술학교), where he formed a big band with students; TenAsia says the SAC Big Band performed successfully in May 2014, and at the time of his death he also led a jazz quintet. An acquaintance told TenAsia that he had no known chronic illness and that a cancer of the muscle had been found a few months earlier; other Korean newspapers name it as a sarcoma, and he passed away at 12:50 p.m. on October 26, 2014. He received a music prize at the 1999 Korea Broadcasting Awards and a presidential commendation at the 2013 Korean Popular Culture and Arts Awards. His wife, Kim Jung-ae, and his son, the trombonist Jung Joong-hwa, survived him; Edaily says the son joined the faculty of the Seoul School of Integrated Arts in 2014.

His working instrument in jazz was the tenor saxophone, which is how Berklee lists him, and his obituaries add flute and clarinet. The flute is a real part of his voice: on "My Romance" from the 2013 album he plays the main solo himself, over trombones and saxophones in unison with the trumpets switched to flugelhorn, and he plays flute again on the mambo-time "Au Privave".

He wrote as an arranger first. His liner notes complain that arranging, meaning the recreation of an existing tune in the arranger's own way, was little understood in Korea, and say that foreign arranging textbooks are built on the big band. He names Sammy Nestico, whose The Professional Arranger he calls a bible, as the arranger he studied hardest, and "Hello, Sammy" is his own tune in his honor. "Here's That Rainy Day" is a Count Basie style chart, and "My Shining Hour" borrows Billy May's short, forceful phrases. The big band albums mix standards by Dorham, Parker, Davis, Miller and Rodgers with Korean material: "Arirang", the popular song "Dolawayo Busanhange" and a film music suite appear on the 2010 album, and "Seoul Express" quotes the folk tune "Ganggangsullae".

On the film side, Discogs files the two Messengers soundtracks under funk, soul and pop, with sax, flute, trumpet, organ and guitar in the band, and describes the 1977 Winter Woman soundtrack as jazz-funk. His club repertoire, on the quartet album All That Jazz, is almost all standards: "In a Sentimental Mood", "All the Things You Are", "Black Orpheus", "Corcovado" and "Wave".