Lee Jiyeun (이지연) is a South Korean pianist, composer and arranger who leads the Lee Jiyeun Contemporary Jazz Orchestra, an ensemble of horns, strings and rhythm section that has grown from a dozen players to 25. Her third album, Feather, Dream Drop (2017), won Best Jazz Album at the 15th Korean Music Awards, presented in Seoul on February 28, 2018. Her albums, Apple Music, Spotify and her own blog and Instagram all bill her Lee Jiyeun; Korean press and some lists romanize the same name Lee Ji-yeon. The Hangul name 이지연 belongs to many unrelated Korean singers, actresses and musicians, among them a 1980s pop singer, and none of them is the pianist described here. Her birth date and birthplace are not published in any source found.

She trained as a classical pianist. EBS, the Korean public broadcaster, wrote in 2013 that she came to jazz through film music and felt, on first meeting it, as if everything she had learned before was fading. In 2003 she went to the Netherlands to learn by playing rather than by theory. Her own biographies list a Bachelor of Music from the Prins Claus Conservatoire at Hanze University in Groningen and a Master of Music from HKU Utrecht School of Arts, and they place her on stages in the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Greece and Britain between 2007 and 2011, including a jazz orchestra she led in Groningen and Utrecht, a club tour of Athens, Volos and Thessaloniki, and the Muralla Jazz Festival in Murcia. EBS counts eight years abroad. She returned to Korea in 2011.

Her debut, Bright Green Almost White, was recorded in Amsterdam on May 24 to 26, 2011 with Dutch rhythm players, a string quartet and the New York trumpeter Alex Sipiagin as special guest, and Paul Pouwer of Power Sound Studio mixed and mastered it. It came out in Korea in 2012. The pianist and educator David Berkman, who wrote its liner note, described a soft, restrained piano holding together modern harmony and lyrical melody. Her own account, in the notes to Blue Flower, is that a first album scored for horns and strings and written, arranged and played by a Korean musician was almost unheard of at the time, since such arrangements were usually commissioned from foreign composers.

Back in Korea she formed a 12-piece group, the Lee Jiyeun Contemporary Jazz Ensemble, later billed as an orchestra, and played it at a string of venues and festivals: the Jazz Yeoljeon series in June 2012, the EBS Space Gonggam series "New Faces of Korean Jazz" on January 7 and 8, 2013, the Ulsan Jazz Festival in July 2015, the Jarasum International Jazz Festival in October 2015 and again in October 2018, the Pyeongchang Music Festival in February 2017, the Suwon Jazz Festival in September 2017 and the National Museum of Korea in July 2018. Her second album, This Place, Meaning, You (다시 그곳에), followed in late 2014. She also wrote for theater, as music director of the plays Cheonghon in 2013 and Fear & Dream in 2016, and has taught as an adjunct professor at the Seoul Institute of the Arts and other Korean universities.

Feather, Dream Drop was recorded in early August 2017 by 12 players and launched with a concert on September 23, 2017. Her album notes describe eight pieces, each tied to an image: a mirror standing in a forest, a voyage to the moon, a red feather flying like a flame, two different winds, a dense fog dance. The Korean Music Awards named it the best jazz album of the 15th edition, and the ceremony took place at the Guro Arts Valley theater in Seoul on February 28, 2018. English-language award lists credit the win to the Lee Jiyeun Contemporary Jazz Orchestra and the Korean list simply to 이지연.

The fourth album, Blue Flower (푸른꽃), came out on September 15, 2021, backed by a grant from the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture. It is ten pieces written and arranged by Lee for piano trio, a five-piece wind section and a string quartet, produced by her with Hong Kyung-sup as executive producer and again mixed and mastered by Pouwer in Amsterdam. Two tracks feature the vocalist Lee Jimin. The album was nominated for Best Jazz Instrumental Album at the 19th Korean Music Awards in 2022, where the prize went to the Jihye Lee Orchestra's Daring Mind. Her orchestra's tenth-anniversary concert, "Moment of Light" (빛의 순간), was held on October 9, 2022 at Aram Music Hall in Goyang, and an 11th-anniversary concert followed there on October 14, 2023 with an 18-piece line-up.

Newer work leans on Korean folk melody. "Maehwa," built on the folk song "Maehwa Taryeong," is a piece she says premiered at the National Gugak Center in 2015 and has since rewritten for a 25-piece orchestra. In 2024 a Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture grant supported a program of new original pieces, premiered on November 24, 2024 at Soweol Art Hall in Seoul, and on October 17, 2025 the orchestra gave a free concert of new works, "From Winter Tree to Spring Tree," at Aram Music Hall in Goyang, with support from the Goyang Cultural Foundation, the Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation and the Arts Council Korea.

The soundtrack concerts

Much of her public profile now rests on jazz-orchestra concerts of film and animation music. She began with Studio Ghibli themes for a quartet in 2015 and a "Ghibli Animation in Jazz" program at the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju in 2016, and told the news agency Newsis in 2017 that she arranged them as a longtime fan of the films. In 2024 the orchestra toured "Ghibli vs Marvel plus Jujutsu Kaisen" concerts to Seoul, Gwangju, Goyang, Busan, Daegu, Seongnam, Daejeon and Ulsan with a 24-player line-up that added violin, viola and cello, and Segye Ilbo called her a jazz pianist and composer in its coverage of the tour. In March 2026 the orchestra announced a Ghibli versus Jujutsu Kaisen concert at the M Theater of the Sejong Center for May 9, 2026. Her own albums remain all original compositions, and she and the ensemble also give Christmas singers' concerts and a jazz-theater piece on The Little Prince.

Lee describes her aim as "impressionist jazz": pieces that treat the orchestra like a painter's palette, with programmatic titles, nature imagery and structures drawn from classical composition, inside which the soloists improvise. The line-up she settled on is a piano trio, a wind section and a string quartet, which sets her ensemble apart from a conventional big band, and her own concert notes call it the only full jazz orchestra in Korea built from winds, strings and rhythm section. Newsis wrote in 2017 that she had no formal composition training and developed her writing and arranging by composing her own pieces.

Folk song is one thread, from the 2015 "Maehwa" through the 2025 program. Another is the album as a sequence of images: Feather, Dream Drop and Blue Flower each come with short narrative notes for every track. Her debut was conceived around Dutch and Korean players together, and her second album took the theme of the first, songs about nature, toward inner emotional change, with one piece, "A Lazy Cat," built on the melody and harmony of John Coltrane's "Lazy Bird."