Soojung Lee (이수정) was a South Korean alto saxophonist and composer, born in April 1999, who passed away on January 4, 2026. She was known to Korean television audiences as a child prodigy before she was known to jazz listeners as a bandleader. Between 2018 and 2025 she released five records as leader or co-leader, among them Four Seasons (2023), which won Best Jazz Instrumental Album at the 21st Korean Music Awards in 2024, and a third full-length album, 26, released in June 2025.

She began on piano at eight and took up the saxophone at ten, according to the Berklee College of Music profile written when she won a place there. At eleven she appeared on the SBS show Star King, which made her widely known in Korea in 2010. By twelve she was studying seriously with the Korean saxophonist Jeeseok Kim, and she then attended the Seoul Jazz Academy on a full scholarship. In 2015 she played at a development-bank conference in Busan with Seoul Jazz Academy students and the Berklee ensemble Los Rumberos de Massachusetts.

Berklee named her one of seven first-semester students to receive its Presidential Scholarship for 2016 to 2017, a four-year award covering tuition, housing and fees. The college lists Jeeseok Kim and the Canadian saxophonist Kenji Omae as her teachers. Berklee's calendar records a student recital on October 31, 2017 and a Soojung Lee Quartet recital on March 2, 2018, with Steven Seo on piano, Jaeil Ji on bass and Taehyun Kim on drums, playing her own pieces alongside music by players she admired. Korean newspapers later reported that she finished a master's degree at 22.

Her first record, Soojung Lee, appeared in 2018, when Korean papers say she was 19. It has five tracks: "Happiness in Blue", "Dice Play", "Beautiful Love", "World Peace" and "A Cave". The sleeve names Ido Haimovich, Jaeil Ji and Taehyun Kim beside hers, and the Korean press rendered the title as 수정 리. Four years passed before the next one. In February 2022 she recorded a live duo album with the pianist Jaehun Kang at Stellive in Seoul. Duology: Live at Stellive came out on September 7, 2022 and runs about 73 minutes over eight tracks, seven of them originals by the two players (six by Lee, one by Kang) and the last one entirely improvised. The same year she took second prize in jazz at the Vandoren Emerging Artist competition for saxophonists and clarinetists, and she played soprano and alto saxophones on Common Heritage of Humankind (2022) by the bassist Hoo Kim's big band.

Four Seasons, released on February 24, 2023 through Sori-e Naite Music Company, is the record that made her name in the jazz world. She composed and produced all ten pieces and recorded them between June and December 2022 at Yireh Recording Studio in Seoul with the bassist Hoo Kim, the drummer Soojin Suh and tenor saxophonists Myungsup Shin and Sunjae Lee. Bandcamp's own list of the month's best jazz, written by Dave Sumner and dated March 29, 2023, singled it out. At the 21st Korean Music Awards in 2024 it won Best Jazz Instrumental Album over records by Heo Daeuk, Jung Su-min, the pianist Mijung Lim and the bassist Song Nam Hyun.

She also played in Soojin Suh's quartet. The Enjoy Jazz festival in Heidelberg listed the Soojin Suh Quartet, with Suh on drums, Hoo Kim on bass, Kang on piano and Lee on saxophone, at the Tankturm on October 14, 2023, in an evening of Korean jazz presented with the Jarasum Jazz Festival. On July 29, 2023, the quartet played two sets on the Esplanade Concourse in Singapore as part of Jazz in July. Esplanade listed its members as Soojin Suh, Soojung Lee, Jaehun Kang and Younghoo Kim, and its synopsis describes the group as combining Suh's Coloris Trio with "saxophonist, Soojung Lee".

In 2025 she was busy. Swingsters, a collaboration with the pianist Jimin Park, who records as Jimindorothy, was recorded in December 2024 and released on March 5, 2025, with the bassist Daeho Kim, the drummer Minchan Kim and her former teacher Jeeseok Kim on tenor saxophone on its opening track. On April 11 she was the saxophonist on Baroque in Blue by the pianist Jisu Jung, with viola and cello. The single "Song for One" came out on June 13, and 26, with the bassist Changmin Jun and the drummer Junyoung Song, followed on June 20. In the same year she won the grand prize in the university instrumental division of the 19th Kyunghyang Newspaper Practical Music Competition.

Her death was reported on January 5, 2026. Her representatives told Kyunghyang Shinmun that she had died the day before, and other Korean outlets, among them Herald Business and Wikitree, repeated the date. A funeral was held on January 6 and she was laid to rest at Seoul Memorial Park. The notices give no cause of death, and none is stated here. Korean press gave her age as 27, while French Wikipedia, working from an April 1999 birth, says 26.

Her writing moved between swing, post-bop and freer forms. Bandcamp's reviewer described Four Seasons as moving between the contemplative and solemn and the volatile and dissonant, with melodies that dart back and forth and sometimes crash against jarring rhythms, which he connected to the unpredictability of the pandemic years that frame the record. Its notes say it holds her memories of eight seasons, four before and four after COVID-19, and that it turns to themes such as disaster, abuse and the pandemic as well as personal ones. Duology is described by the label text as a conversation in which two instruments listen and answer quickly and sometimes step outside the roles of lead and accompaniment.

Swingsters is the most swing-oriented record, built around pieces by Jimin Park and Lee, including her ten-minute "Call Trane" and a bonus track of "Autumn Leaves". 26 is the most personal. Her own text for it says the album records being twenty-six, years of being called a prodigy and a long, uneasy relationship with the saxophone, and that this time she wanted mainly to play music she could enjoy; its tags include free jazz, punk and swing. In a 2025 interview quoted by Kyunghyang, she said the saxophone had made her who she was but that she had felt pulled along by it, and that she was now trying to like it.