Sol Jang (장솔) is a pianist and composer who was born in South Korea on October 1, 1992 and has lived in Arnhem, in the Netherlands, since her master's studies there began in 2017. She leads the Sol Jang Trio with the Dutch bassist Jort Terwijn and the German drummer Max Hering, and the trio's debut album, 19-29 (Unit Records, UTR 5154), came out on October 3, 2024. She also plays in Lavish, an improvising trio with the violinist Maria Isolina Cozzani and the cellist Kim Kamilla Jäger. Her releases bill her as Sol Jang, with the trio billed as the Sol Jang Trio. Her name in Hangul is given as 장솔 on German Wikipedia.

Her Korean background is genuine, but most of her career since 2013 has been abroad, and it helps to say exactly how the two fit. Her label's biography gives Seoul as her birthplace, while the Women in Jazz festival, the German radio broadcaster BR-Klassik and the German magazine Musik an sich say only that she was born in Korea. According to her own website she began as a classical pianist; her timeline begins at Baekseok University in March 2011, and she was among the top twenty on the MBC television talent show The Great Birth that December; the Riga Jazz Stage contest biography dates her debut through the show to 2012. No Korean newspaper or magazine feature on her turned up, and no Korean label has released her music.

Her jazz training began in Korea and continued in the United States. Her website says her early love of jazz took her from Baekseok to the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she studied from 2013 to 2016 and, as her biography puts it, became the first Korean student to graduate early. The same biography lists a Christmas tour of the American East Coast in 2013, a radio appearance on Philadelphia's WRTI in 2014 and a July 2014 concert she organized in Seoul. Several reviews of 19-29 repeat that she returned to Seoul in 2016 and took part in the local jazz scene there, and her teaching history lists two music academies where she taught in 2016 and 2017, before the move to the Netherlands.

At ArtEZ in Arnhem she studied for a Master of Music in Jazz & Pop, and her website dates the degree 2017 to 2019. She has worked there since as a dance accompanist, and she teaches at the conservatory. Her first band abroad was the Sol Jang International Project, which was a finalist at the Sibiu Jazz Competition in Romania in November 2018 and at the Riga Jazz Stage contest in Latvia in April 2019. German Wikipedia says the trio with Terwijn and Hering was founded in 2019. Her site also lists a finalist place in the virtual 7 Jazz Club competition, dated February 2021 there and 2022 in her All About Jazz biography.

In April 2023 Lavish won the Erasmus Jazz Prize, which Codarts Rotterdam awards each year to emerging jazz talent. ArtEZ reported the win after the final at De Doelen in Rotterdam on April 30, 2023, and the prize was worth 3,000 euros. In 2024 Jang won the public vote in the Next Generation competition of the Women in Jazz festival in Halle, Germany: 25 women from across Europe entered, more than 5,000 people voted, and she took 914 votes, ahead of the singer Olga Dudkova and the pianist Victoria Pohl. The prize, the Jazzpreis der Stadt Halle, came with a concert in the Georgenkirche in Halle on May 7, 2024, where the trio presented the music from 19-29.

19-29 followed in October 2024. Her website lists a Korean tour from May 15 to 27, 2024, with dates at My Jazz Garden and SoundDog in Seoul, Yellowtaxi in Daejeon, the Jazztonick Festival in Chungju and Miles Stone in Jeonju, and a Korean tour from August 19 to September 6, 2026; the 2026 dates were announced in advance and her site does not report how they went. Its 2026 calendar also lists a showcase at the Jazzahead fair in Bremen in April and the International Jazz Platform in Lodz, Poland, in July.

The trio plays modern piano-trio jazz in which the bass and drums shape the music as well as accompany it. Jang told Jazz Views that Terwijn and Hering often bring arrangement ideas and take part in sound-based improvisation. Jazzfuel's description of the record, drawn from the label's press material, mentions dense, angular harmony, a playful swing feel, arpeggiated rubato passages, spoken word and groove-driven bass lines. Rolf Thomas of Jazz thing hears a classical pianist who plays with real swing and grooving bass lines, and a trio that joins delicacy with a willingness to experiment.

Reviewers pick out different tracks. Jazz Weekly calls "Philadelphia" hard-bopping and kinetic, "Arnhem" lyrical and folkish, and "Dissolution" a probing exchange between piano and bass. Jazz Views compares the same trio's interplay on "Dissolution" to lines that should not fit together but do. Jazz Journal's reviewer admired "Subway In Seoul" and "Philadelphia," said the second reminded him of John Coltrane in his Giant Steps mode, and also found the album carefully composed to the point of coolness, an academic kind of jazz played with talent but with little risk. Making a Scene's reviewer, by contrast, wrote that the music "flies into my listening room like an uncaged bird."

Her writing leans on personal material. 19-29 is built around places and people: "Arnhem," "Subway in Seoul" and "Philadelphia" are portraits of the three places she has lived, and the spoken Korean on the record includes her father's voice. The title refers to the ages 19 to 29; she told Jazz Views that in that decade she never stayed in one country or city for more than four years. Women in Jazz Media adds that the ambient subway sound on "Subway in Seoul" was recorded on her father's phone and that voice messages from her own phone are woven in.

Lavish works in a different mode. ArtEZ describes the trio as building musical structures around central themes, with sound-based improvisation, jazz and repetitive patterns woven together in a chamber-music setting that can sound small and playful or brutal and thunderous.

No interview in which she names her influences was found, so this section stays with the music and the reviews.