Song Yi Jeon (전송이) is a vocalist and composer who was born and raised in South Korea and has studied and worked in Graz, Basel, Boston, New York and, most recently, Berlin. She publishes under the name Song Yi Jeon, given name first, and Discogs files her the same way. Korean press writes her name 전송이, with Jeon as the family name, and that is also how her own website shows it. German Wikipedia and the Korean Wikipedia list of the 21st Korean Music Awards give the syllables in the reverse order, 송이전, which is not the form she uses. She was born on August 28, 1984, according to The Talks, German Wikipedia and Wikidata; no source gives her birthplace more precisely than South Korea.

Her own label biography says she started early on piano, Korean traditional singing, Korean traditional percussion and drawing. Her instrument now is the voice, used mostly without words and often with live electronic effects, and in The Talks interview she explained that she left classical composition for jazz because she could not picture spending her life alone at a desk. She studied classical composition at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz, then jazz voice at the Music Academy in Basel from 2008 to 2011 and at the Berklee College of Music in Boston until 2014. At Berklee she was the inaugural Quincy Jones CJ&E fellow in 2013 and received the Billboard Endowed Award. The saxophonist George Garzone, from the Berklee faculty, has said she makes music that sounds upside down while it is right side up, a line her website quotes on its front page.

After Boston she settled in New York. Straight, a six-track mini album with a quintet of Leandro Pellegrino on guitar, Jaehun Kang on piano, Changmin Jun on bass and Abraham Rounds on drums, was recorded in April 2014 at PBS Studios in Westwood, Massachusetts and released on January 30, 2015. It closes with "Giant Steps", on which the trumpeter Phil Grenadier and the alto saxophonist Mercedes Beckman guest, and her biography says she launched it with a debut at the Blue Note in New York. Her first full album, Movement of Lives, followed on April 5, 2018. It was recorded in Brooklyn and at Flux Studios in New York with Vitor Goncalves on piano, Kenji Herbert on guitar, Peter Slavov Jr. on bass, Jongkuk Kim on drums and Rogerio Boccato on drums for two tracks. It mixes her originals with Bronislau Kaper's "Invitation" and the Korean folk song "Jungsun Arirang", and she presented it at the Jazz Gallery in New York. In the same years she sang on records by other New York and Boston musicians: the saxophonist Alexander Kuhn's The Ambiguity of Light (2013), four self-released albums by the group Crosswalk Anarchy (2013 to 2018), Alain Mallet's Mutt Slang (2016) and the Gaia Wilmer Octet's Migrations (2017).

She then moved to Switzerland, where she joined the FOCUSYEAR programme at the Jazzcampus in Basel; her biography lists Wolfgang Muthspiel, Ambrose Akinmusire, Billy Childs, Julian Lage, Django Bates and Norma Winstone among the musicians she played with there. German Wikipedia says she met the Brazilian guitarist Vinicius Gomes in the 2018 FOCUSYEAR band. Their duo album Home was recorded at the Jazzcampus Studio in Basel in January 2020 and released on November 18, 2022 by Greenleaf Music, the label of Dave Douglas, who is the executive producer. The ten tracks include pieces by each of them, Keith Jarrett's "Prism", Carlos Aguirre's "Milonga Gris", the Jimmy Rowles tune "A Timeless Place" with lyrics by Norma Winstone and Dominguinhos's "Nilopolitano". Her website says DownBeat rated it four and a half stars, and France Musique's Open Jazz devoted a programme to the pair.

The same pandemic years tied her back to Korean music. With the Stuttgart-based pianist Gee Hye Lee's trio she recorded Parangsae, five tracks released in South Korea on September 30, 2022 and in Germany on February 17, 2023 on meiXmusic, and she plays in a quartet with Gee Hye Lee, the daegeum player Hyelim Kim and the drummer Sun-Mi Hong that sets Korean traditional music beside jazz and played the K-Music Festival at London's Barbican. Hong, a Korean drummer based in Amsterdam, also recorded her on Second Page: A Self-Strewn Portrait (ZenneZ Records, 2020), where she sings and adds effects on two tracks, and the photograph above comes from a concert by Hong's quintet. In 2023 she and Vardan Ovsepian released Lawless Heart, a 13-track duo record that includes six short pieces titled "Breath". It was a nominee for Best Jazz Vocal Album at the 21st Korean Music Awards, whose ceremony was held in Seoul on February 29, 2024; the prize went to another album. Her bio also lists the Jarasum International Jazz Festival and the European Jazz Festival in Korea among her festival dates.

In 2023 the singer Dianne Reeves chose her as her protegee in the Rolex Mentor and Protege Arts Initiative, the two-year pairing of established and younger artists. They sang together, with the guitarist Romero Lubambo, at the Rolex Arts Festival gala in Athens in May 2023, and she joined Reeves on tour; the Straits Times and Euronews both reported the pairing at the time. The programme ended with a concert on November 16, 2024 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London's EFG London Jazz Festival, billed as Song Yi Jeon with a special appearance by Dianne Reeves. A Seoul Shinmun opinion column of July 21, 2026 called her a singer-songwriter and noted that her selection added a Korean name to the programme's line of protégés.

Solitary Bloom (April 1, 2024, self-released) is a trio record for voice, the Italian pianist Lorenzo Vitolo and the Brazilian drummer Paulo Almeida, recorded in Basel in April 2022 with no bass. According to the release text, the title plays on her given name, since Songyi means a single bloom in Korean; "Chorinho for Spring" is for her mother, whose English name is Spring, and "Expecting Spring" is sung in Korean. Three of its tracks, "Dancing Stars", "A Lonesome Place" and "Expecting Spring", were first heard on Home. She teaches jazz voice and improvisation at the Zurich University of the Arts, where German Wikipedia dates her post from 2022. She also gives a bi-weekly online workshop in vocal improvisation for Korean-speaking singers and has published a four-volume solfege course on video.

Her most ambitious work so far is The Earthy Suites (July 1, 2025), written for her nonet. Its three tracks, a Korean folk song and two suites of 21 and nearly 9 minutes, rework rhythms from the Honam, Yeongnam and Jungbu farmers' percussion styles that the Samulnori troupe of Kim Duk-soo arranged for the stage in 1978, and sample the troupe's 1988 anniversary album. Suite Two sets lines from Yun Dong-ju's poem about counting stars at night. The album's nine musicians are Jeon on voice, effects, composition and arrangement; Baptiste Stanek on soprano saxophone; Max Treutner on tenor saxophone; Moritz Renner on tenor trombone; Yosef Itskovich on bass trombone; Fabio Gouvea on electric guitar; Noe Secula on piano; Roberto Koch on bass; and Marton Juhasz on drums. The nonet played the North Sea Jazz Festival in Rotterdam on July 12, 2025 with the Korean percussion group Samulnori Newdot, and de Volkskrant called the set breathtaking. Bimhuis in Amsterdam presented it on April 25, 2026, and the album was reviewed by Paris Move, Take Effect (9 out of 10 in March 2026) and Twisted Soul. Reporting on it in 2025 and 2026 calls her a Berlin-based artist; NDR Kultur said in January 2025 that she had just settled in Berlin after periods in the United States and Switzerland.

Her 2025 and 2026 work is wide. She sings on the guitarist Szymon Mika's AGMA (Music Corner Records, 2025) and tours with his quintet, with Oskar Torok on trumpet, Andrzej Swies on bass and Peter Somos on drums, on Polish dates from September 24 to October 26, 2026, including the Sopot Jazz Festival, Jazz Jamboree in Warsaw on October 25 and Krakow on October 26. Her Intimate Conversation series put her in nine mostly improvised voice duos recorded in Berlin, Basel and New York between November 2025 and April 2026 with Camila Nebbia, Nick Dunston, Anna Webber, Sun-Mi Hong, Kris Davis, Steve Cardenas, Sylvie Courvoisier, David Virelles and Kit Downes. The sessions were released as a monthly video series from December 2025 to August 2026 with support from the Rolex Perpetual Arts Initiative, and her website says an album is in preparation.

She calls her voice her instrument and sings mostly syllables and sounds in place of lyrics, which she told The Talks is close to traditional vocal jazz but more contemporary. She improvises freely, shapes pieces with electronics, and also writes out parts in detail, a habit she traces to her training as a classical composer. Her website describes her sound as modern jazz harmony and odd time signatures joined to melodies that stay with the listener, and NDR Kultur noted that instrumental jazz influences her singing strongly. Dianne Reeves has called her a composer, an arranger and a cultivator of wordless sound, and the Volkskrant's review heard solemn compositions that turn whimsical.

The harmonic language comes from jazz and classical composition; the release text for Solitary Bloom adds Brazilian choro and the multi-instrumentalist Hermeto Pascoal, and says her website shows her performing transcriptions of solos by Charlie Parker, Lyle Mays, Chris Potter and Miguel Zenon. The Brazilian thread runs through her duo with Gomes and her trio with Almeida. The other thread is Korean. Movement of Lives ends on "Jungsun Arirang", Parangsae and her quartet with Gee Hye Lee use Korean folk material, and The Earthy Suites builds whole movements on farmers' percussion patterns and a Korean poem. That text also singles out her control of fast, leaping lines in odd meters, and she has said she wants to do both the extremely free and the extremely tight, which is the thought behind Intimate Conversation. The Subgenres above reflect the jazz of her records; the Korean-percussion material is why Ethno Jazz is included.