Malo (말로) is a Seoul jazz singer whose birth name is 정수월, spelled Soowol Cheong in her label's English biography. She was born on October 25, 1971, and is known for fast, free scat singing, which earned her the press nicknames "queen of scat" and "the Korean Ella Fitzgerald" (she says reporters coined the second one). She has made albums since 1998, most of them on JNH Music, sings in English and in Korean, and has spent much of her career turning Korean songs into jazz repertoire. The Korean Music Awards gave her their jazz album prize twice: in 2021 for Song Changsik Song Book and in 2026 for her first live album, Malo Live at Muddy. Since September 2015 she has also run the Seoul jazz club Janus.

She grew up in a musical household. Her parents met in a Catholic church choir, her father taught her piano, and an older sister went on to classical music. By her own account the family had an old songbook of arias, folk songs and spirituals that she sang from as a child. She wanted to be an astronomer and studied physics at Kyung Hee University. At about 22 she heard jazz in a coffee shop near campus, could not work out how to write down what she heard, and began going to jazz clubs. An American player there told her where jazz was taught, but the fees were beyond her, so she tested herself first: in 1993 she entered the 5th Yoo Jae-ha Music Competition with her own song "그루터기" and won the silver prize. In 1995 she enrolled at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. People around her pressed her to finish a degree there, but she came home after about a year, and in 1996 she began singing scat in Seoul clubs, which music people at the time greeted as the arrival of a Korean singer who could really scat. A night in Daehangno with the violinist Eugene Park (유진 박) at the jazz club 천년동안도, about ten years before a 2007 interview, is the show people remembered for her abandon, and the Ella Fitzgerald nickname dates from then.

Her first album came out in 1998 and was little noticed; a second was recorded but never released, and a 2012 profile noted that every record she has made since includes at least one older Korean popular song. Singing in Itaewon clubs, she noticed that foreign listeners applauded well-known standards while Korean customers stayed cool, and she said in 2007 that this was one reason she committed to Korean-language jazz. The third album, Cherry Blossoms Are Gone (벚꽃 지다, JNH Music, April 2003), is sung in Korean and mostly written by her, with the harmonica player Jeon Jeduk as a guest on three tracks. Her label's biography says a webzine and a music portal named it one of the 100 best Korean records of the 2000s, and its title song remains her signature piece. The fourth, Now to You (지금 너에게로, June 12, 2007), has Korean lyrics by the former journalist Lee Ju-yeop, uses percussion in place of drums and guitar in place of piano, and opens with "Playground", a five-part a cappella scat piece she layered herself after hearing her small son pick out notes on a piano. Reviewers said Korea finally had a proper Korean-language jazz record. A fifth album, This Moment, followed in March 2009.

After a December 2009 concert some listeners asked her to record an album of old Korean songs. The result was 동백 아가씨 (A Lonesome Camellia, JNH Music, September 7, 2010), eleven popular songs from before the 1960s, among them the title song, 신라의 달밤 (The Moonlit Night of Silla) and 목포의 눈물 (Sorrow of Mokpo Harbor), which she arranged and produced herself, ending with an a cappella "산유화" on which she sang every part. It stayed high on sales charts in late 2010 against much larger pop releases, and a Lady Kyunghyang profile reported that about half its buyers were men over 40; she laughed that some of them now took her for a trot singer. She subtitled it K-Standards, the idea that Korean hits can serve a jazz singer as American standards do. That November she and Jeon Jeduk toured Israel, which the Daehak Journal described as the first such tour by Korean musicians, with sold-out shows in four cities including Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

The second K-Standards album grew out of a stage job. In 2010 she was asked to be music director of 천변카바레, a music drama built around the songs of the singer Bae Ho, who died in 1971 at 29, and she played a role in it too. Malo Sings Baeho (JNH Music, 2012) turns 돌아가는 삼각지 into a bossa nova with swing, 안개 낀 장충단공원 into a blues and 안녕 into a nuevo tango, with the first-generation Korean accordionist 심성락 (Shim Seong-rak), who had played alongside Bae Ho, as a guest. A 45 rpm clear-vinyl edition appeared on JNH Music in December 2021, with Shim, the veteran singer Choi Baek-ho and 배선용 credited on individual tracks.

Her sixth album, Winter and Spring (겨울, 그리고 봄, November 2014), is again entirely in Korean and includes two songs written in memory of the victims of the 2014 Sewol ferry sinking, "잊지 말아요" ("Never Forget") and "제 자리로" ("Back to Where They Were"); she has said she wrote the music in three days after Lee Ju-yeop sent her the words. A March 2015 profile in the civic magazine Chamyeo Sahoe found her based in a neighbourhood below Bukhansan in northern Seoul, singing at a local book café, teaching music to first and second graders at a nearby elementary school and arguing against the idea that a jazz singer has to leave for New York. The same article says she was teaching singing at a university, as a 2007 interview also reported. In September 2015, according to Newsis, she took over the running of Janus (야누스), the jazz club that Park Seong-yeon (박성연) opened in Sinchon in 1978; it has since been billed as Diva Janus, and she plays there with her band regularly, by one 2025 account twice a week.

Song Changsik Song Book (송창식 송북, K-Standards Vol. 3, October 15, 2020) came six years after the sixth album. It is a double album of 22 songs by the folk-pop singer-songwriter Song Changsik (송창식), every one arranged by her. A Tumblbug crowdfunding drive in September 2020 raised about 29.4 million won from 392 backers, 293 percent of its target. She chose the songs from his sheet music, often by the lyrics, rather than from memory of the records; working through them took her more than a year, and early run-throughs with the band ran past ten minutes a song. In the arrangements 왜 불러 is a tango with flamenco colour, 피리 부는 사나이 a swing number, 선운사 a bossa nova, 가나다라 a piece in seven beats, 20년전쯤에 a Cuban piece and 고래 사냥 an experiment in modal, rock and blues sound; 밀양 머슴 아리랑 is an a cappella piece with her own overdubbed voices, and 꽃, 새, 눈물 is a piano and voice duo with her pianist. Song himself sings with her on "우리는", which the label's notes call his first recording since a 1986 album. The core band is the pianist Lee Myeong-geon (이명건), the guitarist Hwang I-hyeon (황이현), the bassist Jeong Yeong-jun (정영준) and the drummer Lee Do-heon (이도헌), with the vibraphonist Mother Vibe (마더바이브), the multi-instrumentalist Yu Jong-hyun (유종현) and the percussionist Kim Jeong-gyun (김정균) as guests. The 18th Korean Music Awards, held on February 28, 2021, gave it Best Jazz and Crossover Album in the jazz category; the selection committee called it work that sings in her own voice while keeping the original composer's music clearly in view, and one of the results that made 2020 a bright year for Korean jazz.

Her first live album, Malo Live at Muddy, was recorded over two nights in May 2024 at Muddy, a small new jazz club in the North Jeolla city of Gunsan. Her producer Lee Ju-yeop of JNH Music proposed it after watching her for 23 years, the engineer Hwang Byung-joon (황병준) recorded and mastered it and Yoon Jung-oh (윤정오) mixed it. With the quartet above she plays standards such as "Black Orpheus", "Willow Weep for Me", "Charade", "What a Wonderful World" and "Armando's Rhumba", three wordless scat pieces and, as the encore, "Cherry Blossoms Are Gone"; a piano string snaps during "A Time to Love, a Time to Cry (Florzinha)" and is audible on the record. It reached streaming services on July 24, 2025, with a Dolby Atmos version on Apple Music, and came out as a double LP in the autumn, and a solo concert called Perfect Moment at the Mapo Art Center on September 27, 2025 was announced as her first since Nobody Knows in 2016. At the 23rd Korean Music Awards on February 26, 2026 it won Best Jazz Vocal Album, and Mijung Lim's Impromptu took Best Jazz Instrumental Album the same evening.

On September 15, 2025 Janus reopened in Gwanghwamun, its seventh home after Sinchon, Daehangno (1985), the Ewha Womans University area (1996), Cheongdam (1997), Seocho (2007) and Apgujeong (2023). She and Lee Ju-yeop are its co-heads, and her band played "Bye Bye Blackbird" first, a song chosen to chase off bad luck, before an eight-day opening festival. On the first night she changed the words of "Harold's House of Jazz" to name the club. She has also sung beside older figures of the Korean jazz scene. An undated tribute CD for the trumpeter Kang Dae-gwan has her singing "My Funny Valentine" and joining the closing jam with Park, Lee Jeong-sik (이정식), Kim Soo-yeol (김수열) and others. Since 2022 she has also led the vocal quartet Carina Nebula (카리나 네뷸라), with Park Raon, Kim Min Hee and Kang Yun-mi; its first album, Good Match (JNH Music, April 27, 2023), which she composed and arranged in large part, was nominated for Best Jazz Vocal Album at the 21st Korean Music Awards.

Her scat is her calling card, ornate and unhesitating. Her label's biography names Ella Fitzgerald and Dinah Washington as her main inspirations (Fitzgerald, she says, showed her how to approach jazz singing with the mind) and John Coltrane, an early explorer of non-Western spiritual traditions, as the musician who drew her most strongly into jazz. She has also said she cannot be a pure American-style jazz singer, because Korean traditional music was part of what she heard growing up, and that she thinks of the Korean language, with its different sentence structure and pronunciation, as something to bring into jazz rather than hide. Critics describe a husky, powerful voice with a flair for stage comedy and gesture.

Her central idea is the Korean standard. Rather than copy American songbook readings, she argues that a standard is any good song that a singer can reinterpret, and she has applied that to old Korean pop (the 2010 album), the songs of Bae Ho (2012) and the repertoire of Song Changsik (2020), always arranging and producing the music herself. Her own Korean-language songs, from 벚꽃 지다 to "제 자리로", are plain and unadorned, with lyrics on the fourth album and the Sewol songs by Lee Ju-yeop. In concert she mixes these with English-language standards in swing, Latin, bossa nova, blues and ballad styles.

Her scope is jazz first. She has also sung on television and film soundtracks (the 1999 SBS drama Solid Man and, per Korean Wikipedia, two 2006 films), and the 2010 and 2012 albums gave some listeners the impression that she is a trot singer, but she says she does not care for genre labels and her albums, awards, club and repertoire are jazz.