Kim Min Hee (김민희) is a jazz singer from Busan, South Korea, who sings standards and swing. She is the lead voice of the retro swing group Golden Swing Band, with which she has made three albums, and she has two albums under her own name, Don't Explain (2019) and Confessin' (2024). Three records she sang on were nominated for Best Jazz Vocal Album at the Korean Music Awards: the band's Golden Rules at the 19th awards (2022), the four-woman vocal group Carina Nebula's Good Match at the 21st (2024) and Confessin' at the 22nd (2025). Her album covers and her YouTube channel spell the name Kim Min Hee; streaming services also show Kim Minhee and Min Hee Kim, and English-language award tables write Kim Min-hee.

Almost no biography has been published. The fullest account is a cover story in the magazine Jazz People by Im Hee-yun, published on December 1, 2024, in which she says she has no website of her own and that her history is hard to find online. No source gives her birth date or birth year. In the interview she calls herself a Busan person, and she attended Busan Samsung Girls' High School.

She began on classical piano at seven or eight and prepared for an arts high school until the last year of middle school, when she decided against it because lessons had stopped being fun. She kept playing through her second year at an ordinary high school. Her listening then was Korean ballad albums (Shin Seung-hun, Kim Hyun-chul) and Mariah Carey, and she liked dancing and singing along to the girl group S.E.S. Jazz was not on her mind until she saw an advertisement for a university applied-music department and started at a cram school in January of her final year of high school. After several months there, where every student sang the same songs the same way, she told her teacher she wanted to do jazz. She learned from a three-disc collection of standards at home that included Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong, and she auditioned with a Diana Krall song and a song of her own. She entered the Dong-ah Institute of Media and Arts, where Malo, who had gone to the same high school, was teaching. She says Malo's classes frightened her, partly because she then wanted to do showy, difficult jazz with elaborate scat and arrangements.

Her taste settled after she met the friends who became her band. The guitarist Joon Smith (Jeong Jun-yeong, 정준영), a schoolmate she met at 21, influenced her most. She recalls that the band began with him suggesting they revive the music they had once played together, something with the feel of the Nat King Cole Trio, around 2012. By her account she had been in Seoul about three years after graduating, teaching at music academies and playing hotels, where she sang and played piano alone. Around then she and the bassist Jeon Chang-min (전창민) auditioned for Berklee College of Music as a bass-and-voice duo. Both were accepted; he went and she did not, and she says she has no regrets, because the band was starting and she had never lived or studied abroad. As of that interview she had never performed outside Korea, and she notes that none of the members of Golden Swing Band studied overseas.

Golden Swing Band is a quintet: Kim on vocals, Joon Smith on guitar, Choi Yeon-ju (최연주) on piano, Choi Seong-hwan (최성환) on bass and Gwak Ji-ung (곽지웅) on drums, with Oh Jong-dae (오종대) listed on Korean Wikipedia as a former drummer. Korean Wikipedia dates its debut to its first album, Golden Times (2014), and the group followed it with The Golden Legacy (2017). In 2019 a single for the KBS drama Perfume appeared on Apple Music credited to Go Won Hee and Golden Swing Band. Golden Rules (2021, Machang Music and Pictures) was its third album and came out on LP with a gatefold sleeve; the saxophonist Hachul Song is named as a featured player on five of its nine tracks. A Kyeonggi Ilbo preview of an August 2023 matinee concert by the Icheon Cultural Foundation described the band as a retro, traditional jazz group that had proved itself at the Jarasum International Jazz Festival and at festivals in Seoul and Busan. At the 19th Korean Music Awards, where the nominations were reported in March 2022, Golden Rules was one of five nominees for Best Jazz Vocal Album, and the prize went to Maria Kim's With Strings: Dream of You.

After several years as the band's singer she made her own album at the end of 2019. Don't Explain came out on October 8, 2019 on Mirrorball Music (catalogue MBMC1837), with eleven songs: "Isn't It a Pity", "The Night We Called It a Day", "Our Waltz", "Don't Explain", "Born to Be Blue", "Vanity", "You'll Never Know", "May I Come In?", "If You Go Away", "You Go to My Head" and "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning". She says she wanted something unlike the band, quiet music she would listen to at home, built on a spare lineup of bass, guitar and voice, and that it was mostly slow ballads about feelings after a breakup, sung almost in a whisper. She remembers the sessions as emotionally draining. The release notes on Discogs call the album contemplative and describe a calm delivery different from her work with the band. The jacket carries her name, "KIM MIN HEE", and the number 01.

Nearly five years passed before the second album. She counts the pandemic, Golden Rules and Carina Nebula as the reasons. On October 29, 2022 she gave a concert of acoustic standards with guitar, bass and trumpet in the Art Hall Mac of the Mapo Arts Center in Seoul, one of three singer evenings in the center's Jazz Reboot series called Vocalist; the others were by Kim Ju-hwan and Bu-young Lee. A Dutch trumpeter, named in Korean press as 윱 반 라인, was her guest. Newsis wrote of her warm tone and plain delivery, and described the evening as a chance to be known as a singer in her own right and not only as the singer of Golden Swing Band. She also teaches voice lessons and says she tells her students to exercise, because singing uses the whole body.

Carina Nebula is a vocal quartet of Malo, Park Ra-on, Kang Yun-mi (강윤미) and Kim, named for the Carina Nebula, nicknamed a cradle of stars. Its first album, Good Match (April 27, 2023, 12 tracks, JNH Music), was a nominee for Best Jazz Vocal Album at the 21st Korean Music Awards in 2024, where the group was also one of six nominees for Musician of the Year. The Best Jazz Vocal prize went to Yujin Kim's Extraordinary. Kim says the four rehearsed almost every day for about a year and that she learned a great deal from the others, each of whom hears and produces pitch differently. On the first night of the Art Valley Asan jazz festival with Jarasum, on October 7, 2023 at the Sinjeongho lawn in Asan, the quartet closed the evening, according to News Seoul.

Confessin' is her second solo album, released on September 27, 2024 by Poclanos, and it is again billed to Kim Min Hee, with the number 02 on the sleeve. It has nine songs, and the Discogs entry is for a white vinyl LP: "'Deed I Do", "I'm Confessin' (That I Love You)", "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea", "This Time the Dream's on Me", "My Melancholy Baby", "Fools Rush In", "Smile", "Loads of Love" and "There's a Lull in My Life". She chose lesser-known standards on purpose, because she says audiences who come to clubs often know only "Fly Me to the Moon" and "L-O-V-E", and she wanted music that is easy to listen to and still traditional. She asked the wind player Park Gi-hoon to produce and arrange; he also played clarinet and flute. Each track has its own instrumentation, which she compares to a book of short stories, with an accordion on the title song. For the arrangements she looked to Jeri Southern's 1957 album, Shirley Horn's Loads of Love (1963) and the 2023 album I Love a Love Song! by Rachael and Vilray. Joon Smith's guitar was recorded first for "Fools Rush In" and she sang to it without a click or eye contact, which she credits to nineteen years of working together, and she sings and plays piano herself on the closing song. A Jazz Docent newsletter looking back at the jazz albums of 2024 grouped Confessin' with Hee-kyung Na's BOSSA as records that deepened standards and bossa nova. At the 22nd Korean Music Awards in 2025 it was one of five nominees for Best Jazz Vocal Album, alongside Hae In Cho's Sight Beyond Sight, Kim Ju-hwan's After Midnight: Still in the Moonlight and Youn Sun Nah's Elles; Nam Yeji's Old Songs, Gap won.

Speaking in December 2024, she said she planned to play on December 25 at Flat Nine, a jazz bar in Seocho, and to rest in January and February. A third album was already outlined: a piano duo record with Gwak Jeong-min (곽정민) and, someday, an album of Korean pop songs reworked as jazz, as Malo did with Song Changsik Song Book.

Newsis describes a warm voice and a plain, uncluttered tone, and Jazz People's headline calls her a singer of deep minimalism, an image it develops with the comparison to a restaurant that serves one dish for decades. Her own view, given to Newsis in 2022, is that a good jazz singer keeps studying how to get the best sound out of her own body and knows what she wants to say, which matters more than singing well. The repertoire is the American songbook and swing, from Nat King Cole's trio sound, her stated starting point for the band, to the Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong recordings she first sang along to.

She names Diana Krall as the source of her audition song, and Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong as the first singers she imitated. Her role models, she says, are the people around her who keep making the music they want to make, and she singles out the story of the pianist Carla Bley that she read in Jazz People and cried over. She is open about her limits: the notes around the G, A and B above middle C are the hardest for her to sound beautiful, which she says is unusual because most singers struggle higher up.