Kaon Kim (김가온, written Kim Ga-on in Korean news reports) is a Seoul jazz pianist, composer and university teacher. He studied composition theory at Seoul National University, then jazz piano at the Berklee College of Music in Boston and in the graduate program at New York University, and came home to Korea about a year before his debut album. He has led his own piano trio ever since, made two albums under his own name, in 2009 and 2011, and teaches in the practical music department at Baekseok Arts University. Albums and concert programs print his name as Kaon Kim, the Apple Music listing of his duo record spells it Kim Ka On, and the Korean press writes Kim Ga-on. This profile is short on dates because he has not published a birth date or birthplace, and none of the sources found gives one.

In a 2024 interview for Seoul National University's College of Music he said he decided on a music degree only in his last year of high school, a late start, and chose the composition department's theory major because it suited his studious streak. He said he had always liked sitting at the piano and improvising on chords, so jazz did not feel far away, and that harmony, counterpoint and ear training from the theory major kept paying off in his playing. He also said that arriving at Berklee as a Seoul National graduate felt like a weight, which made him work harder. The notes for his debut album say he spent six years studying and working as a player in the United States before returning, and name the pianist Kenny Werner as his teacher, quoting Werner's description of him as an energetic, quick-witted player who knows how to make playing enjoyable. A 2010 concert announcement adds that he had already played hundreds of club dates and guest spots by then.

His first album, Un/Like the Other Day, came out on November 11, 2009. The announcement for his first full concert, at Olympus Hall in Seoul on May 29, 2010, says the album had been picked for Naver Music's weekly selection of domestic albums. That concert paired his own pieces with Korean songs such as "섬집아기", with the harmonica player Jeon Jeduk and the singer Malo announced as guests, and with photographs he had taken on his travels shown during the music. A second concert followed on July 9, 2010 at Guro Arts Valley, in a "Piano Man" series that also featured Yiruma and Kwon Sun-hun. The same announcement lists his television work, among them the SBS show 골드미스가 간다 and an XTM program, and says he lectured at Dankook University, the graduate school of Baekseok University and Seoul National University's Western music institute.

His second album, Prismatic, followed in June 2011 on the J-Arts label with Universal Music Korea listed as distributor. Its notes describe the title as the way light splits into colors through a prism: a contemporary Latin tune, funk-flavored originals, a Spanish art song and a Korean song arranged for jazz, and two standards, one of them with Malo singing. Streaming credits for the album name the drummer Dohyun Lee and a performer named Inyoung Kim, who is the bassist of his later trio, with Jungsu Oh listed as a further performer. That summer Olympus Hall opened a six-month jazz series, and its "Jazz Prismatic" concerts were built around his playing and spoken commentary, with a pop-jazz singer and a DJ among the announced guests. The label's notes for "Cry Me a River" say Kim and Malo played together every Wednesday night for about two and a half years at the Seoul jazz club Janus, which Park Sung-yeon founded.

Through the 2010s he kept a working trio. A 2015 announcement for Hyundai Pharm's 77th Art M Concert describes the Kim Ga-on Trio as Kim with the bassist Kim In-young and the drummer Kim Hong-gi, calls Kim Hong-gi the winner of a 2013 Korean Music Awards prize for best crossover and jazz album, and lists his own "Like the Other Day", "Autumn Leaves" and a Lee Moon-sae song on the program. In March 2016 he played a duo version of Piazzolla's "Libertango" with the guitarist Park Youn-woo at one of the House Concert series' living-room shows, and in August 2017 he opened the Brunch Stage series at Blue Square Hall, a morning concert followed by a restaurant brunch.

His longest collaboration on record is with the Paris-based singer Minjung Lee. They began playing together as a quartet on her 2016 Korean tour and gave their first duo concert on the next tour in 2017. They recorded My Favorite Things at Yireh Recording Studio in Seoul on January 2 and 3, 2019, mostly in single takes, with Lee arranging and Kim co-producing, and the album came out on April 17, 2019. They launched it at Sunset-Sunside in Paris on September 7, 2019.

In December 2023 he played a Christmas-season trio concert at The Vine Hall in Jeonju with the bassist Kim Seong-su and the drummer Lee Sang-min, whom the program calls the best drummer in Korea and a fellow student from his years in the United States. The set mixed carols with "The Shape of My Heart", Lee Moon-sae's "가로수 그늘 아래에 서면", "Libertango" and Chick Corea's "Armando's Rumba". The program calls him a pianist who has made two albums and several project albums, and says he has recently worked as a sideman with many musicians, and that he was returning to the piano-trio sound he likes best. His most recent activity found is from 2024, and he was still listed as a Baekseok professor that August.

His own words and his album notes point to a pianist who works inside the standard jazz language and colors it with Latin and funk rhythms. A 2017 concert notice says he reinterprets standards with feeling and has played bebop, Latin, funk and contemporary styles. The notes for his debut say most of its tracks are his own, the exception being "Solar", a Miles Davis standard that he rearranged in a post-bop manner, and that some of his writing shows the influence of Pat Metheny. They describe "Like the Other Day" as a relaxed folk-pop melody that recalls Norah Jones, "Always" as a ten-minute piece that ends in a drum solo, "Heartprints" as a blend of electric piano and saxophone, and "겨울맞이" as a solo piano improvisation. The cover photographs were taken by Kim himself while he was a student in the United States.

Prismatic widens the range, with Kim's Latin and funk tunes, a Spanish art song by Fernando Obradors sung by the soprano Cho Hye-won over a piano trio, and "Cry Me a River" played rubato with Malo. His duo album with Minjung Lee goes further toward classical song, recasting Spanish, French, Korean and German art songs and an Italian opera aria in jazz harmony. The release notes there describe him as a jazz pianist who first trained in classical music, and a TV and teaching profile sits alongside the recordings, but everything he has released is jazz.