Pureum Jin (진푸름) is a South Korean alto saxophonist, composer, arranger and bandleader who made her name in Seoul's jazz clubs and festivals and has been based in the New York area since 2015. Wikidata and German Wikipedia give her birth date as January 25, 1987 and her birthplace as Iksan, in North Jeolla Province. Her 2013 live album was issued under the name Jin Pureum, in Korean family-name-first order, and her later records use Pureum Jin. The name also gave her debut studio album its title: according to her label, Pureum means blue and Jin means real, hence The Real Blue.

She has said that she picked up the saxophone in middle school after watching friends perform and suddenly wanting to make music herself. She learned at a neighborhood saxophone academy run by a friend of her father's, then met the saxophonist Kenji Omae, who introduced her to jazz (Jazz Avenue interview, January 2023). She studied at Kyung Hee University in Seoul and, by her own biography, took her bachelor's degree there in 2008. When the Grec festival in Barcelona booked her in 2018, its program note said she had started on classical music until the playing of John Coltrane changed her life.

Her biography dates her professional career to the early 2000s. In Seoul she led a quartet in the city's jazz clubs, and it lists appearances at the Jarasum International Jazz Festival between 2009 and 2014, Takatsuki Jazz Street in Japan in 2010, the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival in 2012 and the Seoul Jazz Festival in 2013. In 2012 the Korean magazine Jazz People named her one of five rising stars, and she was a top-five finalist at that year's Jarasum International Jazz Concours. In 2015 she was one of two young Korean jazz artists featured on the EBS program Space Gonggam.

Her first record came out of Germany. The bassist Martin Zenker, who had spent four years in Korea as a guest professor of jazz and double bass at Kyung Hee University, brought her to Germany for a concert in 2012, and the Korea JoongAng Daily reported in December 2013 that this concert gave him the idea for the JazzKorea festival, organized with the Korean Cultural Center in Berlin. Her quartet, with Zenker, the pianist Paul Kirby and the drummer Minchan Kim (김민찬), recorded live at the Künstlerwerkstatt in Pfaffenhofen on July 27, 2012. Nagel-Heyer Records issued the set as Live in Europe in 2013. It runs to nine tracks, two of them Kirby originals, and her biography lists JazzKorea in Germany in both 2012 and 2013.

She moved to New York in 2015 to study at the Manhattan School of Music, where she earned a master's degree in jazz performance in 2017. In the 2023 interview she described deciding to study abroad after marrying, applying to schools by video audition, and arriving in a bitterly cold winter with little English. JAZZIZ adds that her training included an apprenticeship with the pianist and composer Jim McNeely. After graduating she spent about a year in Charlottesville, Virginia, where her husband was studying, played in the sextet of the trumpeter John D'Earth and was artist in residence with the University of Virginia Jazz Ensemble in November 2017. Her first child was born during these years. She returned to New York in the summer of 2018 and, by her biography, has played Birdland, Smalls, Jazz at Kitano and Dizzy's Club; JAZZIZ also names the Shapeshifter Lab.

Two records followed from that year. On July 17 and 18, 2018 she played four sets at the Jamboree club on Barcelona's Plaça Reial as a guest of the pianist Ignasi Terraza's trio, with Horacio Fumero on bass and Esteve Pi on drums, in the Grec festival; the live recording was released by Swit Records as The Real Blue Live in Barcelona, with the trio billed first. The Real Blue itself was recorded on December 16, 2018 at GB's Juke Joint in Long Island City and released by Cellar Live on June 21, 2019. It is her first studio album: eight originals and two standards, "Night and Day" and "Speak Low," produced by Jin with the pianist Jeremy Manasia as executive producer, and with Luke Sellick on bass, Willie Jones III on drums and the singer Sabeth Pérez as guest on "The Song of Silence." The opener, "Trembling Forward," draws on her experience as a woman, an immigrant and a new parent, and "Seminole Trail," "Fireflies," "When Blue Gets Blue" and "The Song of Silence" were inspired by Charlottesville. Brian Morton reviewed it in DownBeat in September 2019, hearing a player whose tone, speed and ideas arrived fully formed, with a lineage back to Phil Woods, and singling out Jones's drumming and the Woods tribute "Remembering Mr. Woods." JAZZIZ made "Trembling Forward" its Song of the Day on May 31, 2019.

Recognition followed. Her biography says she was named best alto saxophonist, best female rising star and jazz artist of the year at the 2019 New York City Readers Jazz Awards, presented by Hot House magazine and Jazzmobile, and that she was a finalist in the Made in New York jazz competition and played the awards ceremony at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center with Al Foster and John Lee. At home, The Real Blue made her a nominee at the 17th Korean Music Awards in 2020, in the Best Jazz and Crossover Performance category. She also played DC Jazz Fest and the GREC festival in 2018, and returned to Charlottesville for later residencies: "Sister Saxophones" with the baritone saxophonist Lauren Sevian in 2019, and "New Beginnings" in 2024, a concert marking John D'Earth's last performance with the UVA Jazz Ensemble.

Her current band is The Empress, a four-saxophone group that Jin founded, leads and produces, playing alto and soprano; Erena Terakubo plays alto, Chelsea Baratz tenor and Sevian baritone, with Steve Ash on piano, Joey Ranieri on bass and Pete Van Nostrand on drums. The band recorded Square One at Van Gelder Recording Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey on April 11 and 12, 2024, and Cellar Live released it on March 21, 2025. Eleven standards and originals, almost all arranged by the German baritone saxophonist Michael Lutzeier (Jin arranged "Everything Happens to Me"), make up a straight-ahead set that Jazz Journal's Brian Payne praised in May 2025 for its lively ensemble playing, rich harmonies and punchy solos. The Korean Cultural Center in Washington, D.C. and the DC Jazz Festival co-presented Pureum Jin & The Empress at Union Stage in The Wharf on September 5, 2026, a seven-piece edition of the band with Tessie Overmyer and Lisa Parrott in the saxophone section and Allyn Johnson, Amy Shook and Billy Williams in the rhythm section.

Jin's own account is of a bebop and hard bop player who wanted to carry that sound forward while finding a voice of her own. In the 2023 interview she said that reviewers of The Real Blue kept calling her traditional even though some of her writing is more modern, and that she prefers to write what she wants to say rather than decide in advance whether it is modern or traditional. JAZZIZ names her closest influences as John Coltrane, Kenny Garrett and Benny Golson, and notes a classical background and her studies with Jim McNeely. DownBeat's comparison was to Phil Woods, whose tight, controlled wail the reviewer thought younger players rarely chase any more.

She plays mostly alto saxophone, with soprano in The Empress. The Real Blue is built on her own tunes with a rhythm section that swings hard, while The Empress turns to standards and to Lutzeier's arrangements for saxophone choir, including pieces by Coltrane and Benny Golson. In the interview she also described how Seoul's smaller scene, where a few players cover many styles, sometimes led to sessions in genres she did not feel were hers, and how New York gave her an audience that came to hear what she actually wanted to play.