Nam Yeji (남예지) is a South Korean jazz vocalist, songwriter, author and teacher, born on July 19, 1981. Korean Wikipedia and Wikidata give Busan as her birthplace; she grew up and went to school in Seoul, where her parents live. Her fourth album, Old Songs, Tmmm (오래된 노래, 틈, released October 22, 2024), won Best Jazz Vocal Album at the 22nd Korean Music Awards, held in Seoul on February 27, 2025. Her name is written several ways. Her recent releases on Spotify, Apple Music and the Korean services bill her as Nam Yeji, and the sleeve of Old Songs, Tmmm prints Namyeji. Two of her releases on Spotify, Terra Incognita and the single "Save the World", sit under Yeji Nam, which is also how Discogs credits her on the 2003 album Nouveau Son. English Wikipedia writes Nam Ye-ji.

She did not set out to be a jazz singer. As a child she sang from the songbooks at home while her mother sang and her father played guitar, and she has said she knew many old songs her schoolmates had never heard. She studied psychology at Chung-Ang University, intending to become a criminal psychologist, joined a hip-hop club and performed on campus and in hip-hop clubs. Korean Wikipedia lists a grand prize in the R&B category of Mnet's Idream song festival in 2001. A newspaper advertisement led her to the Seoul Jazz Academy, and near the end of the course she auditioned for a company that was making a vocal album, singing "This Masquerade" from her ensemble class. The company asked her to record a song instead.

The album was Nouveau Son (With33Music, released in March 2003 according to Discogs), a vocal project that gave Korean pop songs of the 1980s and 1990s jazz arrangements. Discogs credits her, as Yeji Nam, with the vocal on its first track, "춘천가는 기차" ("The Times Forgotten"). The other vocals went to Oe, Cho Seong-bin, Yeahwon Shin (신예원), Noh Kyung-bo and Kang Min-wook. The record was produced by Juhan Lee, who also plays trumpet and flugelhorn, and by 이영주, with arrangements by the saxophonist Sungjae Son (손성제) and Mijung Lim (임미정) on piano. She has said that she soon found herself making a debut appearance on the television program 수요예술무대 (Wednesday Art Stage), co-hosted by Kim Kwang Min and the singer Lee Hyun-woo, shaking as she sang jazz.

Her first album, Am I Blue?, followed on June 8, 2004, planned by Eon Music and distributed by Mirrorball Music according to Bugs. Its thirteen tracks are mostly Korean-language songs, and Bugs files it under ballad and jazz with a jazz pop tag. The list carries the Nouveau Son song twice, as "춘천 가는 기차" and as "The Times For Gotten", and includes "사랑합니다", billed as the theme song of the film The President's Barber (효자동 이발사), which Spotify also lists on the film's soundtrack under her name. She has said that she wanted to sing Korean pop and R&B, in the line of singers such as Big Mama and Gummy, and that the people around her kept telling her that her voice was jazz. She describes coming to jazz through other people's judgment rather than her own choice.

For several years afterward she was unsure the label fitted. She went back to university, and around 2007, near graduation, a friend working for a concert agency told her a vocalist was needed for the big band of Shin Kwan-woong (신관웅), whom the Vogue Korea interview describes as a first-generation jazz figure who formed the country's first jazz big band. She prepared two jazz songs, and he then asked her to come once a week to his club Moon Glow. Other clubs followed, among them Blue Moon and All That Jazz, according to the LOCOMOTION interview. In her twenties she thought of herself as someone imitating jazz who sang the melodies without improvising or scatting. She copied Charlie Parker solos every day, and in her thirties she bought textbooks to teach herself improvisation, which, she says, is when jazz became fun.

She studied jazz as a subject as well as a craft. Her master's degree in practical music at the Graduate School of Arts of Chung-Ang University rests on a thesis about the "jazz songs" of 1930s Korea. Korean Wikipedia also lists a doctorate in cultural content studies at Korea University, and she describes entering doctoral study as a way to pursue interdisciplinary research on jazz. Meanwhile she kept recording. Terra Incognita, her second album, came out on April 13, 2011. She says she signed with Jazz Park for it, and streaming services credit JP Company. Bugs names 황인규 as producer and Kurt Lundvall as mastering engineer, and describes fourteen tracks of soul, jazz and Latin influence in which her own songs sit beside reinterpretations of "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" and "My Favorite Things".

Her third album, 인형의 집으로 오세요 (Come to the Doll House), was released on November 17, 2016 by Leeway Music & Media according to Bugs, with the singles "Anna" and "Maria" released ahead of it in October 2016. It has nine songs, each named for a girl, and she wrote the lyrics of all nine and the music of seven. She told Vogue Korea that whenever she sat down to write her thesis she found herself wanting to make music instead, which is how an album of her own songs came about, and that after releasing it with no company behind her she was too drained to perform it. The band was the pianist 임보라, the guitarist 이동섭, the bassist 황인규, the drummer 한순욱 and the cellist 지박, and the producers were Vitali and Nam. Around the same period she took part in a project group's album, Our Song, by Merry Go Round.

Teaching and writing grew alongside the singing. In 2020, during the pandemic, she started a chat room called 재즈를 불러봅시다 (Let's Sing Jazz) for people who were not professionals, and it grew to about a hundred members, who gave a public concert on March 15, 2025. Her book 재즈, 끝나지 않는 물음 (Jazz, Endless Questions, subtitle 인문학으로 재즈를 사유하다) was published by 갈마바람 on April 20, 2022. She says it grew from a column, 인문학으로 재즈 횡단하기, that the editor of Jazz People gave her while she was writing her dissertation, and that a publisher got in touch after the first installment. She says she read Lacan and Deleuze for sentences that would help in talking about jazz, and the book grew out of those notes. In her own account she also teaches students at a school, and her research continues: in March 2025 she said she had interviewed about ten working jazz players for a study of the professional identity of Korean jazz musicians.

Old Songs, Tmmm grew out of the thesis. She found that jazz was popular in colonial Korea, with articles on Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington circulating in translation, and that songs such as Kim Hae-song's "청춘계급" and Son Mok-in's "싱싱싱" from the 1930s already blended jazz with popular song. She says the Japanese authorities banned jazz in 1940, that it disappeared from Korea, and that it returned only in 1950 on the stages of the US Eighth Army. The album imagines what Korean jazz would have become had that break not happened. The title plays on 틈, a gap or crack: she uses it for the openings an improviser finds in a written score, possibilities the composer did not foresee, and calls the habit of mind that looks for them "jazz thinking" (재즈적 사고).

The nine songs are "가시리" (Gashiri), "꽃타령" (Song of Flowers), "뱃노래" (Sailor's Song), "희망가" (Song of Hope), "사의 찬미" (Praise of Death), "목포의 눈물" (Tears of Mokpo), "새야새야" (Oh, Bird), "찔레꽃" (Wild Rose) and "몽금포타령" (Song of Monggeumpo). She arranged six of them, and 김현중 arranged "꽃타령", "뱃노래" and "희망가", according to Melon. The producer was the bassist Wonsool Lee (이원술), a senior musician she says she confides in and who agreed to the project after first declining. The band is Lee on bass, the pianist 비안, the guitarist 오정수 and the drummer 김종현, with recording by 신대섭 and Lee and mixing and mastering by 윤정오. Melon lists the album as released by D Ocean Music, with her own company, Jazzology, as agency and her as executive producer. The distributor's head and the producer proposed "찔레꽃" as the lead track, with "새야새야" as a secondary title song, and she has said that "가시리" was shaped largely by improvisation in band rehearsals. Most of the songs were out of copyright. For "목포의 눈물" she obtained permission from the wife of the composer Son Mok-in but could not reach the lyricist Mun Il-seok's side, so the arrangement could not be registered, and she could not get permission for "어기여 디어라" (Eogiya Dieora), so it was left off the album.

The 22nd Korean Music Awards gave the album the prize for Best Jazz Vocal Album (최우수 재즈 - 보컬 음반). The other nominees were Hae In Cho's Sight Beyond Sight, Kim Min-hee's Confessin', Kim Ju-hwan's After Midnight: Still in the Moonlight and Nah Youn-sun's Elles, and the instrumental jazz prize that night went to the Jihye Lee Orchestra's Infinite Connections. Asked about it afterward by Vogue Korea, she said she was very happy and also thought of the musicians behind the albums that had impressed her over the year, and that she felt both grateful and apologetic toward the players who had performed the songs with her in clubs for a long time. She added that she had never had much to do with awards.

Since the award she has kept releasing. "어기여 디어라", a song by Lee Sang-eun, came out as a single on May 2, 2025, and she performed it for the awards' own 29CM Stage video series. "머물러, 그대" (Stay, Dear) followed on September 11, 2025, and "Fallin'", with Jicheon, on September 25, 2025. She is also a featured vocalist on "The Birth of Sarah" on the soundtrack of the Netflix series 레이디 두아 (listed on Spotify as The Art of Sarah). In March 2025 she said she wanted to record jazz settings of poems by writers who resisted the Japanese colonial authorities, and in an interview published in June 2025 she said a government grant for it had been refused and the project might not be ready in time for the 80th anniversary of liberation. No release of that project was found.

She first listened to Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, she told Vogue Korea, and began by imitating any unusual voice she heard, with no single moment of deciding on jazz. Her early ambitions were in the Korean R&B and soul of Big Mama and Gummy. The hip-hop and R&B side of her career is real but small: she is a guest vocalist on records by the hip-hop group K-Flow (the singles "Delicious Days" and "One Day", 2009 and 2010 on Spotify), the producer Loptimist and the rapper MC Sniper. Bugs tags her first three albums as jazz pop and jazz or vocal jazz, and the songs on Terra Incognita and Come to the Doll House are largely her own.

Old Songs, Tmmm is where the jazz identity becomes explicit, and it works through repertoire rather than through new songs. A Jazz Docent newsletter on the albums of 2024 (February 16, 2025) set it beside Studio 360 Light Music Band's instrumental Prophecy, which gives Korean folk songs such as "밀양아리랑" and "한오백년" psychedelic touches, and called the Nam album close to the opposite: led by the voice and acoustic in sound. Her own explanation is conceptual. Improvisation is, in her words, a way of opening gaps in a smooth written world, and she says that her real interest is the thinking behind it, which she wants listeners as well as players to share. Her approach to the music is also scholarly, drawing on colonial-era newspaper archives and on philosophy, and her research on jazz musicians' working lives sits beside the singing.