Kang Tae Hwan (강태환, written 姜泰煥 in Japan) is a South Korean alto saxophonist and one of the founding figures of free jazz and free improvised music in his country. He plays seated cross-legged, uses circular breathing to hold sound for minutes at a time, and has long preferred to call what he does "free music" rather than jazz. Discogs lists about 15 releases under his own name, from Korean Free Music (1989) to the double CD Microcosm (2024), and his work has been issued in Korea, Japan, Lithuania and Hong Kong. He was born on July 15, 1944. Discogs and MusicBrainz give Seoul as his birthplace, while Korean press traces his childhood schooling to Incheon; no biography states where he was born. He turned 82 in July 2026.

In a 2011 interview with GQ Korea he said his family ran a brewery and had no artists in it, that his school pushed him into its band and that he resisted, running away more than once. He has described weak lungs as a boy. He entered Incheon Dongsan Middle School on a special track and then Seoul Arts High School (서울예고), where by his account he was the only boy admitted on the practical exam alone; Korean press give differing accounts of whether he left in his second year or graduated. Clarinet came first and the alto saxophone later, and he has said he began in a swing band. Korean Wikipedia says that in 1968 he became the youngest jazz bandleader in the country.

The group that made his name began in 1978. Weekly Hankook's 2002 profile of him says the Kang Tae Hwan Trio started that year at Space Sarang (공간 사랑), the experimental arts space in Seoul, with the percussionist Kim Dae Hwan (김대환), his cousin, and the trumpeter Choi Sun Bae (최선배). The same article counts 76 performances between 1978 and 1986, when Kang proposed stopping because the group had run out of new ideas, and says the trio became the first Korean jazz group invited to Japan, in 1985. Korean Wikipedia calls it the country's first free jazz group and dates its end to 1988, and later press profiles repeat the "first" description; the 2002 article does not make that claim, and the three musicians were still recording together in 1988. As the Seoul Free Music Trio they were recorded in Tokyo on June 23, 1988, and that session opens Korean Free Music (Yeh Eum, 1989), his first album, reissued in Korea in 1998 as Korean Free Jazz. The album also holds a solo piece, a duo with the percussionist Midori Takada recorded at Suntory Hall in Tokyo on July 3, 1988, and a duo with the British saxophonist Evan Parker recorded at Yeh Eum Hall in Seoul on September 14, 1988. A set from Shinjuku Pit Inn on July 5, 1988, with the same three players, appears on Kim Dae Hwan's Like a Dew Also Like a Thunder (2004). Kim Dae Hwan passed away in March 2004. The trio reunited from time to time; Weekly Hankook describes a 2002 concert at Buam Art Hall in Seoul as its first reunion in five years.

Japan gave him an audience early. Tokebi (JVC's Zen label, 1991), recorded on April 12, 1991, pairs his alto with the hojeok, a Korean double-reed shawm, played by Kim Suk Chul and the janggu drum of Kim Yong Toek in two long pieces, "Sora-E (To The Sky)" and "Eien (Eternity)". Weekly Hankook says that in 1990 he formed a trio called Donggeurami (동그라미, the Korean word for circle) with the pianist Masahiko Satoh and Midori Takada; its first two albums, on the Japanese label Ninety-One and filed on Discogs under the name Ton•Klami, are In Moers, recorded at the Moers festival in Germany on May 19, 1991, and Paramggod, recorded in Tokyo on September 8, 1994 with the American reed player Ned Rothenberg as guest. In a 2025 interview he says that Satoh is officially his teacher and privately his older brother, that the trio toured the Soviet Union, Southeast Asia and Japan and played 13 shows in two weeks at Pit Inn, and that he has given solo concerts in about 80 Japanese cities.

Much of the 1990s record comes from the Japanese producer Takeo Suetomi, who ran the coffee shop Café Amores in Hofu, Yamaguchi, and the label Chap Chap Records. Suetomi recorded the 1994 concerts that became Kang Tae Hwan (Chap Chap, 1995), with Rothenberg and the turntablist Otomo Yoshihide as guests, and three 1995 concerts that NoBusiness Records of Lithuania later issued: the Satoh and Takada trio recorded on May 27 as Prophecy of Nue (2017), a solo set recorded on October 8 as Live at Café Amores (2018), and the duo with Takada recorded on March 14 as An Eternal Moment (2019). On October 10, 1995 he recorded a Shinjuku Pit Inn trio with Satoh and the percussionist Masahiko Togashi, released the next year by the Korean label AD.forte as Asian Spirits. A 1993 concert in Matsue with the vocalist Sainkho Namtchylak was released as Live, and concerts in Hofu, Hiroshima and Kobe in November 1999 with the drummer Yoshimitsu Ichiraku and the guitarist Kazuhisa Uchihashi were issued as the limited double CD Clearness (2000). Another Kang Tae Hwan Trio, with the guitarist and sarangi player Makoto Kawabata and Ichiraku, recorded the single 49-minute piece Love Time in Nagoya on April 16, 2001; it was released in 2004.

Back in Korea he became the partner of the drummer Park Je Chun (박재천) and the pianist Miyeon (미연). Their Improvised Memories was recorded live on December 22, 2002 to two-track DSD, and Korean Wikipedia credits it as the first Korean album recorded in DSD and issued on SACD. Isaiah, recorded on March 19, 2005 at Dolce Classical Hall in Ilsan, is one 49-minute continuous performance, issued in 2006 in a numbered edition of 500 and reissued in Hong Kong in 2018. The three still play together; the Korea Jazz Association filmed a trio set at the 2022 Seoul Jazz Festa. Seven Breath (2002) collects his own compositions and was produced by Park, and its "A Deep Breath" was chosen for the 2006 Wire sampler for the Atlantic Waves festival.

Sorefa (素來花, 2011), a two-CD solo album recorded in Seoul and released by Audioguy Records, won the Best Jazz & Crossover (Performance) award at the 10th Korean Music Awards in 2013. In 2019 he improvised with the violinist Kang Haejin at the IAP Collabo Stage in Seoul on September 22; the performance became Circle Point. A December 2021 Dong-A Ilbo profile reported that he had been treated for heart failure a few years earlier and still practised eight to ten hours a day, and announced a trio concert at the Seoul venue Ghetto Alive titled "始原音 - the starting point of Korean free jazz". Ghetto Alive held a master class with him on January 17, 2024, and released his solo double CD Microcosm that year, recorded in his own underground practice room and described in its release notes as his first solo work in thirteen years. On February 29, 2024 the 21st Korean Music Awards gave him its lifetime achievement award (공로상). The critic Kim Hak-seon wrote in Pressian that his name is nearly synonymous with Korean free jazz and that he is held in higher regard abroad than at home. In August 2025 three archival live recordings from Seoul house concerts, dated 2005, 2006 and 2011, were released digitally.

His method rests on breath. He has said he taught himself circular breathing after hearing of the technique second-hand, that two or three minutes came easily, ten or twenty were hard, and that long practice brought him to about 40 minutes. For about three years he recorded himself daily on cassette, cut roughly 500 pieces down to 25 and memorised them, since he considers his music impossible to notate. Tom Greenland of the New York City Jazz Record heard five extended improvisations on Live at Café Amores built on circular breathing and multiphonics, a spare, restrained approach with shifting timbres, and wrote that he does not sound quite like anyone else; Stef Gijssels of the Free Jazz Blog admired his tone and his skill in altering the timbre of the horn. Keith Prosk heard the 1995 An Eternal Moment as a recording from a chrysalis stage of his style, with Takada's drum kit and marimba answering his extended techniques.

He talks about improvisation as a matter of beauty rather than method: in the GQ interview he said it is not important that you are improvising, only that it is beautiful, and that in a duet one player should answer the other without overpowering or being overpowered. In the 2025 interview he says that in improvisation all language is excluded, which is why he likes to play with foreign musicians, and that he numbered his works in a series under the label FM, for Free Music, because he thinks of jazz as free music not bound by the history or geography of free jazz. In 2002 he called his own style "personality music". Korean press often calls him one of the three great free jazz saxophonists in the world, alongside Evan Parker and Ned Rothenberg; it is a reputation rather than a published ranking.

Korean instruments and song enter his work at the edges, most clearly in the hojeok and janggu of Tokebi. His Japanese partnerships, with Satoh, Takada, Togashi and Otomo, drove the albums of the 1990s, and the Japanese critic Teruto Soejima coordinated, produced or wrote the notes for several of them.