Soo Cho is a pianist and composer who was born in South Korea and has lived in the Netherlands since 2001. MusicBrainz gives Seoul as her place of birth, and a 2015 profile in the Dutch magazine JazzNu describes her growing up there; her date of birth is not published. She has released five albums under her own name between 2008 and 2016: Prayer, Little Prince, Pandora, Ballerina and After All. Her connection to Korea is her origin and her early training. Her jazz education, her bands, her labels and her concert life are Dutch and European, and the press list on her website is made up largely of Dutch, Belgian, German and Italian reviews and interviews.

She began classical piano lessons at the age of three. Her website says she later studied classical piano at Sung Sin University in Seoul, and the catalogue of Challenge Records adds flute. Her family was a sporting one: in a 2016 interview with Jazz'halo she says her parents and twin brothers were international athletes, and that her mother saw classical piano as a respectable pursuit and jazz as something for dark bars. After university she taught children and played piano in hotel lobbies, restaurants, bars and at weddings. In one of those rooms she heard a jazz trio, which she recalls as Duke Jordan's, and decided that was what she wanted to play.

Studying jazz in South Korea turned out to be possible only privately and was unaffordable, according to JazzNu, so a Dutch friend helped her find a place at the conservatory in Utrecht. She sold her piano and arrived in the Netherlands in 2001, studying there with Bert van den Brink. After a year she moved to the more international Amsterdam conservatory to work with Karel Boehlee, Rob van Bavel and Kris Goessens. JazzNu reports that her first audition there failed and that hearing Keith Jarrett play "Blame It on My Youth" brought her back to practising; she was accepted on the second attempt. She graduated in jazz piano from Amsterdam in 2006, took a master's degree in jazz composition at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague in 2008 and a second master's degree, in jazz piano, in Amsterdam in 2009. She also spent one semester at the Manhattan School of Music in New York, where her teachers included Jason Moran. In the Jazz'halo interview she says she felt like an outsider there and missed Europe, where her teachers had accepted her own compositions.

Her early concerts were her own: a trio, monthly evenings at the Baseline Theatre and, in the 2005/06 and 2006/07 seasons, a series at the DJS Jazzpodium in Dordrecht to which she invited soloists from the Netherlands and Belgium. In 2008 she was selected for the Young Vips Tour, and in 2013 she was named Musician in Residence in Nijmegen, according to her website.

Her first album, Prayer, came out on Challenge Records in March 2008. It was billed to the Soo Cho Quartet and featured the Dutch trumpeter and flugelhorn player Angelo Verploegen, the Austrian bassist Daniel Lottersberger and the Greek drummer Sotiris Ntouvas, with all eleven pieces written by Cho. Little Prince followed on the same label in October 2010 with Verploegen, the bassist Sven Happel and the drummer Yonga Sun; Challenge Records ties it to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince and to a return to childhood. For her third album she formed Jass United. The name is made from the first letters of its members' names: Javier Girotto, Jasper van Hulten, Soo Cho and Sven Happel. Pandora was released in 2013 on the Norwegian label Curling Legs and presented at the Bimhuis in Amsterdam on May 30, 2013. Dave Gelly reviewed it for The Observer on November 3, 2013, calling the set cool, clear, melodic and beautifully integrated, and singling out "Tango Tango".

The saxophonist and flautist Javier Girotto became her closest partner. In the Jazz'halo interview she says he was in the Netherlands for a duo concert with the accordionist Luciano Biondini in Arnhem, stayed on, got to know her compositions and asked for the scores; she has written for him since. When the Steyr Jazz festival in Austria booked her quartet and travel problems got in the way, the festival's organizer suggested a duo concert with Girotto instead; it led to the duo record Ballerina, released by the Austrian label Alessa Records in 2014 and presented at the STIWA Jazz Forum in Hagenberg on April 9, 2014. In 2015 she and Girotto played concerts with the Seoul-based gayageum player Soo Jin Lee as a guest. Cho had met Lee at a concert in South Korea that paired contemporary and traditional musicians, and JazzNu reports that she wrote new pieces for the combination, adjusting them to the limited range of keys on the Korean zither.

Her fifth album, After All, is a piano trio record with the bassist Janos Bruneel and the drummer Lionel Beuvens, recorded on January 28 and 29, 2016 at Fattoria Musica in Osnabrück and released on ZenneZ Records in May 2016 with a presentation concert at Miles in Amersfoort on May 26. The Dutch critic Erno Elsinga called it her most personal album in a review for Jazzenzo, and Rinus van der Heijden, writing for JazzNu, praised the interplay of the three players. VPRO's Vrije Geluiden listed it among notable new releases in June 2016.

Her website's press page also lists Korean coverage: an interview in the magazine Jazzpeople in May 2010 and articles in Swingpeople (March 2008) and Yonhap News (November 2007). The most recent news item on the site announces a trio concert at Sijthoff in Leiden on September 24, 2021, with seating limited under pandemic rules. No album after After All has been found.

Her Hangul name, her date of birth and her citizenship are not stated in any source found. The Nationality field reflects her birth in South Korea.

She describes her own approach as delicate, intimate, soft and beautiful, as opposed to the muscular, acrobatic playing of many younger male pianists; the Bimhuis listing for her 2013 concert quotes her to that effect from an interview in NRC Handelsblad and calls Keith Jarrett her great example. A note on Challenge Records' page for Prayer, written in the first person by the quartet's trumpeter, says her trio concept derives from Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett and Brad Mehldau, with piano, bass and drums sharing responsibility for melody, harmony and rhythm. In the JazzNu profile she names Chopin as an example and says she wants to play her own music rather than imitate anyone.

In the Jazz'halo interview she says her classical training is both her strength and her weakness, that the jazz she plays does not rest on bebop, and that her pieces often begin as open improvisation. She also says she carries Korean culture in her head as a kind of treasure. Dutch writers hear lyrical, restrained music: the same note praises the sensitivity and natural lyricism of her writing, and The Observer found Pandora cool and clear. Her version of "She Believes In Me" on Pandora is a reworking of Steve Gibb's song, which Dutch listeners know in André Hazes's rendition "Zij gelooft in mij".