Park Yong Kyu (박용규) is a South Korean jazz guitarist who plays bebop and hard bop, trained in the Netherlands in the 1990s and has led his own quartet in Seoul since 2010. His two albums as leader, Beautiful Life (October 29, 2010) and The Old Is Best (December 6, 2012), are both billed to the Park Yong Kyu Quartet, and that is the spelling printed on the sleeves. Other Latin spellings of the same Hangul name appear in print: Park Yong-gyu, Yongkyu Park and Yong-kyu Park. No source found gives his birth date or birthplace, and no interview with him turned up; what follows rests on concert notes, album notes, press listings and the credits on other musicians' records.

The fullest biography comes from the broadcaster EBS, which presented his quartet on its Space Gonggam concert series on March 21 and 22, 2013. It says he went to the Netherlands in 1992 and took a bachelor's and a master's degree at the Utrecht conservatory, studying with the guitarists Eef Albers and Jesse van Ruller and playing with Dutch musicians including the pianist Rob van Bavel. He returned to Korea in 1997. A 2015 interview with the Korean musician Oh Young-jun, published by Channel Yes24, also mentions a guitarist Park Yong-gyu who had studied in the Netherlands.

Back in Seoul he formed The Quartet (더 쿼텟) with the pianist Yang Joon Ho, the bassist Lee Soon-yong (이순용) and the drummer Lee Doheon. The liner notes of Yang's 2008 album Portrait In Bill Evans date the group to 1998, and its album First Morning is dated 2000 there and in EBS's biography, while some Korean sources print 2001. The group's own upload of the title piece "Morning" lists the line-up. Yang's notes say the group ended when its members went abroad to study. Album copy for Park's first record, which gives the year as 2001, calls First Morning a masterpiece ahead of its time that left a mark on Korean jazz history, and describes him as one of the country's first-generation jazz guitarists.

His first album under his own name came a decade later. Beautiful Life was released on October 29, 2010 by BIC Music (catalog OPC-0184) and distributed by Leeway Music & Media. The label's notes say it holds eight of his own compositions, recorded digitally at 24 bit and 96 kHz in an acoustic room, and that he wrote in the liner notes that it records the last ten years of his life. The quartet was his old friend Lee Soon-yong on bass, the pianist Lee Han-eung (이한응), who studied jazz piano at Humber College in Toronto, and the drummer Lee Chang-hoon (이창훈), who completed master's studies in jazz drums and jazz vibraphone at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. The same notes say that at the time Park lectured at Dongduk Women's University and the Seoul Institute of the Arts. The album's title piece was included on Rainbow 2010 Korean Jazz Best 27, a two-CD sampler that came with the June 2011 issue of the magazine Jazz People. On March 27, 2011 the quartet played the album's eight pieces at the Munhwa Ilbo Hall in Seoul, as one night in a ten-day series of nine Korean groups presented with commentary by the jazz critic Hwang Deok-ho. The organisers' copy for that night called him the textbook of bop guitar and a living legend of the Korean jazz guitar scene. A short essay on the album in Park Seong-geon's book on Korean jazz records says that the line of Korean jazz guitarists had thinned after the Eighth Army club generation, and that his appearance revived it; the essay calls the playing small and quiet but resonant.

The Old Is Best followed on December 6, 2012. Bugs lists eight tracks running 44 minutes: "Monologue", "Alternative Route", "Mr. Baldy", "Secret Love", "Wind Song", the title piece, "I Remember You" and "Park's Blues". The label's notes name the drummer Lee Chang-hoon, the pianist Lee Han-eung and the bassist Ko Jae-gyu (고재규) as his quartet and add Han Chung-wan (한충완) on Fender Rhodes, Hong Jin-hee (홍진희) on piano, Kim Seong-su (김성수) on bass and Rob van Bavel as guests, without saying which of them plays on which track. A blurb attributed to the critic Hwang Deok-ho likens the eight tracks to eight dishes laid out for anyone who loves guitar sound. EBS's concert notes say the music recalls 1950s bebop and hard bop, and that he built the March 2013 programme on tracks from this album, with the pianist Hong Jin-hee and the singer Yun Gi-ju (윤기주) as guests; Han Chung-wan played piano in the quartet that night, with Ko Jae-gyu on bass and Lee Chang-hoon on drums. EBS posted an unbroadcast take of "Beautiful Life" from the concerts on April 9, 2013.

In March 2012 the quartet had been on the bill of the second "Korean Jazz Yeoljeon" series at Pan Theatre near Hongdae in Seoul (March 25 to April 1), where the press listed it among the veteran players already established on the scene. After the new album it kept to the festival circuit. It was among the eight bands in the Ulsan Jazz Festival's showcase on October 6, 2013, and in December 2013 played the Yagi Music Festival at Yagi Studio in Seoul, where a video shows "The Old Is Best" with the young singer Ki Ju (기주). On August 9, 2014 it played the Chilpo Jazz Festival in Pohang, billed with the singer Heo So-young, with Han Chung-wan, Ko Jae-gyu and Lee Chang-hoon. In October 2014 a Jeju monthly listing named the quartet as that month's jazz act at a cafe in Seonheul-ri, and a Jeju newspaper listed him as a guest at the homecoming recital of the pianist Kim Na-ri on October 27, 2014, with her teacher Rob van Bavel.

He played on other musicians' records too. For Ki Ju's debut EP Run Run Run (BIC Music, December 5, 2013) he composed some of the songs and took part in the recording with Lee Soon-yong and Lee Chang-hoon, under Han Chung-wan's production, according to the album notes and a press release. On The Music Of Cole Porter & Harold Arlen: The Gal That Got Away (October 20, 2016), the singer Kim Ju Hwan's songbook album, he is one of two guitarists, with Kim Jae-woo, and a 2016 review singled out the guitar work of both. On May 3, 2014 he was one of five guitarists at a tribute day for Jim Hall at the Audio Guy Studio in Seoul, playing a duo set at 5 p.m. with the bassist Kim Seong-su in the manner of the Hall and Ron Carter duo, beside Jo Young-deok, Park Yoon-woo, Charlie Jung and Han Un-gi.

Later credits are fewer. A 2020 profile of the guitarist Kim Seong-hyeon says he studied with Park from the second half of 2017. K-Jazz Live posted videos of the Park Yong Kyu Quartet playing at the club Bar All That Jazz, one of them in April 2018, with the trombonist and singer Jeong Jung-hwa, the bassist Ko Jae-gyu and the pianist Son Ju-wan. Press notices in September and December 2021 named a guitarist 박용규 among the players on 남한강의 노래 (Song of the Namhan River), a jazz album of Chungju folktales produced and composed by the drummer Lee Chang-hoon for the arts company Salome. On May 28, 2022 "Park Yong Kyu and friends" played The Vine Hall in Jeonju, and the newspaper notice repeated his Utrecht degrees and described him as teaching at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. On April 30, 2023 a guitarist 박용규 was listed with Lee Chang-hoon in the Chungju Jazz Association's World Jazz Day concert at the open-air stage of Ureuk-dang. Those last two listings give only his name and instrument. No album under his own name after 2012 turned up; both quartet albums were added to streaming services on May 11, 2020.

His own words about influences were not found, so this section follows what others have written. EBS calls his teachers Eef Albers and Jesse van Ruller scholars of jazz guitar in the Netherlands, and says his quartet, with solid fundamentals, plays orthodox jazz that recalls 1950s bebop and hard bop. The label's notes for Beautiful Life promise the serious appeal of pure mainstream jazz in eight of his own pieces. The repertoire on the second record mixes his own tunes ("Mr. Baldy", "Alternative Route", "Park's Blues") with the standards "Secret Love" and "I Remember You".

Two things in the record link him to the older tradition. His duo set at the 2014 Jim Hall tribute followed the format of Hall's duo with the bassist Ron Carter, and the same album copy that calls him a bop guitar textbook places him in a line of Korean jazz guitarists that runs back to the Eighth Army club era. Beyond that, the sources describe him in general terms and little more can be said of his sound without inventing it.

Other people are named 박용규, among them a theologian, a scholar and a professor of journalism, and the name also turns up in credits on pop releases listed on Discogs. None of those is tied to this profile.