Min Rager is a pianist, composer and teacher who was born and raised in Seoul and has built her entire jazz career in Montreal. Her three albums, her website, Discogs and every review bill her as Min Rager, and that is the name she works under. McGill University's faculty page is headed Min Jung Suh, with Min Rager in the biography beneath it, so the two names belong to one person. No source gives her name in Hangul. She is not the drummer Soojin Suh, who shares the Suh surname.

All About Jazz and the Wikidata record for her give 1975 as her birth year, and Wikidata gives the date as February 4; her own biography and McGill give no date. Her biography says she was born in Seoul and moved to Montreal in 1997 to pursue a professional music career. DownBeat's Scott Yanow, in a review quoted on her website, writes that she was raised in Seoul, and the French Wikipedia article says she began playing jazz in the city's local clubs and that her reputation grew quickly.

At McGill she studied jazz piano, and the French Wikipedia article lists her teachers as Wray Downes, Jeff Johnston, Kevin Dean, André White, Gordon Foote and Jan Jarczyk. It says she graduated in 2003 with a prize for excellence in jazz piano. Her biography adds a master's degree in jazz performance from the Schulich School of Music, finished with the distinction "Outstanding Achievement in Jazz Piano". In a 2009 All About Jazz Take Five interview she named Herbie Hancock and Eliane Elias among her influences and said the first jazz album she ever bought was Bill Evans's Alone.

In 2003 she formed a quintet to play her own compositions and arrangements. In 2004 that group, with Dean on trumpet, Donny Kennedy on alto saxophone, Kieran Overs on bass and White on drums, recorded a studio program of new pieces for CBC Radio Two's jazz series. It was broadcast across Canada in October 2004, and Effendi Records issued the recording as her debut album, Bright Road, in October 2005. That summer the quintet was nominated for the Grand prix de jazz General Motors at the Montreal International Jazz Festival, and her trio with White and the bassist Alec Walkington won the Best New Artist award at Montreal's L'OFF Festival de Jazz. All About Jazz's Budd Kopman reviewed Bright Road in January 2006, calling it mainstream jazz that is "anything but flabby or shallow". Other reviews quoted on her website heard earthy hard bop in the manner of Cannonball Adderley's early 1960s bands, with JazzReview's Mark Keresman suggesting she could become the new Sonny Clark, and La Scena Musicale's Paul Serralheiro heard a percussive attack like Horace Silver's on the faster pieces and touches of Bill Evans in the ballads.

In 2008 the CBC commissioned a ten-minute jazz suite for two pianos from her. It was submitted to the European Broadcasting Union as part of its 2009 Handel project, marking the 250th anniversary of the composer's death, and the CBC recorded it as part of a concert at Montreal's Pollack Hall that featured the New York tenor saxophonist Walt Weiskopf. Her second album, First Steps (Effendi), was recorded in Montreal in 2009 and came out on October 27, 2009. It brought back Dean, Kennedy and White and added the bassists Fraser Hollins and Walkington, Weiskopf on tenor for one track, and her husband, the pianist Josh Rager, for a closing duet, "Always Near to You". Raul D'Gama Rose of All About Jazz called her an unbridled piano virtuoso with a feeling for the blues, and Geoff Chapman of The WholeNote named her one of Montreal's most promising pianists, writing that the album arrived five years after her debut. The Montreal outlet Pieuvre gave it three stars out of five, and its title track, a modal nod to John Coltrane's "Giant Steps", was chosen for the Women 2010 disc of Jazziz's Spring 2010 sampler.

She then spent several years away from the studio. DownBeat's review of her next album says she led her own trio in the interval and took time off to raise her two sons. Train of Thought, her third album, was released independently on September 28, 2017, by the Min Rager Quartet: Rager, the tenor saxophonist Kenji Omae, who DownBeat says had recently returned to Canada after a decade in South Korea, and her regular rhythm section of Hollins and the drummer Dave Laing. It is eight of her own compositions. Yanow gave it a favorable review in the March 2018 DownBeat, finding Omae's tenor in the John Coltrane and Michael Brecker tradition and her playing full of fresh statements; Peter Hum of the Ottawa Citizen and Dan McClenaghan of All About Jazz also reviewed it in November 2017, McClenaghan hearing in Omae a mix of Jackie McLean and Art Pepper.

Teaching is the other half of her working life. McGill lists her as a course instructor and lecturer in jazz piano and jazz combo, and its biography says she also teaches piano studio, jazz keyboard proficiency, arranging and improvisation at Concordia University. The same biography says she has toured widely in Canada and plays with Don Thompson, Terry Clarke, Kieran Overs, Donny McCaslin, Joel Frahm, Weiskopf, Omae, Dean and White, and that she has appeared on several National Film Board of Canada soundtracks, among them Jason Lee's documentary short Letters from Pyongyang.

She writes in the mainstream and hard bop tradition. Her own description, in the Take Five interview, is a sound between the modern and the traditional, with attention to melody, harmony and form when she composes, and she said her main aim as a teacher is for every student to swing eighth notes properly. Reviewers have heard Silver's percussive attack on the faster pieces and Evans in the ballads of Bright Road, a strong blues feeling and a bebop foundation on First Steps, and a crisp, free-rolling solo style on Train of Thought. Her titles point to her models: "Portrait of Miles" is a ballad for the trumpeter Miles Davis, and "Say What You Mean" is based on Wayne Shorter's "Yes or No", according to Yanow.

For her dream band she named the tenor saxophonist Seamus Blake, the bassist John Patitucci and the drummer Bill Stewart, and the records she was listening to at the time were Blake's Live in Italy, Maria Schneider's Concert in the Garden and anything with the pianist David Kikoski. Her favorite recording of any, she said, is a Herbie Hancock trio concert album, Live in Europe.

Scope is clear: every release she has made is a jazz album of original compositions, she studied and teaches in jazz departments, and the awards and festival nominations she holds are all jazz honors.