Triologue (트리오로그) is a South Korean jazz guitar trio of the guitarist and leader Kim Min-seok (김민석), the bassist Kim Changhyun (김창현) and the drummer Oh Jong-dae (오종대). It made two albums, Speak Low (2005) and Too Soon Too Late (December 2014 on Discogs, March 2015 on the streaming services), and its debut won two prizes at the third Korean Music Awards, held on March 14, 2006 at Konkuk University's Millennium Hall in Seoul: Performance of the Year (올해의 연주) and Best Jazz & Crossover Single for "It Rains". The name blends "trio" and "dialogue", as the MM Jazz editor Kim Gwang-hyeon explained in his review of the first album.

The group's releases are not consistent about its name. Discogs, Spotify and Apple Music print Triologue; the cover of Speak Low and the Bugs listing print TrioLogue; the Hangul is 트리오로그, and some Korean newspapers in 2006 wrote it 트리올로그. Several unrelated acts share the name, among them a clarinet, flute and piano trio of Vlady Bystrov, Helen Bledsoe and Alexey Lapin, an older Discogs artist whose credits are festival compilations, and a 2010 Spotify album called Concepts.

Kim Gwang-hyeon's review, reprinted on the Korean retailer Yes24 with the debut album, gives the only account of how the trio came together. By 2005 the three players had been working for almost ten years, so the record was a debut for the band rather than for its members. The story begins about seven years before the review. Kim Min-seok, then in the fusion group Interplay, was recording an album with Oh Jong-dae, the pianist Im Mi-jeong (임미정) and Jeon Seong-sik (전성식), and the sessions stopped when Oh left to study music in the Netherlands. Oh had been moved by that work, and after he returned to Korea in 2003 he went looking for Kim Min-seok. Kim was planning a duo album with a bassist, heard that Oh was back, went to him at once and proposed a trio. Kim Changhyun, who already played sessions with Oh, was the natural third member. No source gives a formation date; the review points to the period after 2003 and says the first album took about a year to make.

The same review describes each member as of 2005. Kim Min-seok first caught the editor's attention in Interplay, which was the subject of MM Jazz's second CDplus in October 1998 and played the music of the Pat Metheny Group, and he was known for the delicate, sensitive writing and arranging that took him into crossover projects with the soprano Shin Young-ok, the singer Im Hyung-joo and the pianist Park Jong-hoon. According to the review he also played for a long time with the pianist Kim Kwang Min on the Wednesday Art Stage (수요예술무대) series. Kim Changhyun had graduated from Sogang University's journalism and broadcasting department before going to the United States, where he studied at Berklee College of Music, Western Michigan University and a university in Indiana and finished a jazz master's course. Back in Korea he worked on albums and concerts for Hahn Choong-wan, Youn Sun Nah and Shin Young-ok, taught in the practical music department of Baekje Arts University (백제예대), and was described as strong in mainstream jazz built on bebop. Oh Jong-dae had traded ideas since the early 1990s with Lee Jung-sik, Juhan Lee and Lee Young-kyung before leaving for the Netherlands. After returning in 2003 he played with the KBS orchestra, was an adjunct professor at Dong-ah Broadcasting College, taught at Kyung Hee University, and had a reputation as the drummer melody players preferred. These are the reviewer's statements, not details the players confirmed. The Baekje post is the 2005 one: the 2012 release profile of Kim Changhyun's Reverberation and Dankook University's own faculty directory place him at Dankook University.

Speak Low came out on April 22, 2005, on CD from Kang & Music (distributed by STM, per Bugs). It has twelve tracks, and the review counts two cover versions, Astor Piazzolla's "Oblivion" and Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Bonita", with the rest the group's own music. Kim Min-seok wrote six pieces, including "Home", where Kim Changhyun's bowed bass gives a classical air. Oh composed "Lullaby" for his two sons, and it is played on electric guitar, while "From a Distance" was written by Cho Seong-bin, the singer-songwriter of Interplay, and is a guitar and bass duet. Kim Changhyun wrote "Hypnosis", which the reviewer called the most experimental track. The guitarist opens the record with a solo prelude, "Gurium" (그리움), and the review notes that a version of "It Rains" with Kim humming existed but was left off to keep the album to the trio alone. The producer was the jazz columnist Ha Jong-wook and the recording engineer Lee Han-cheol; the review says the three players spent more of their studio time talking than playing, in rehearsal and around the takes. MM Jazz named it a Best of Choice in its April 2005 issue.

Prizes and appearances followed in 2006. The Korean Music Awards, whose nominees that year were collected on a compilation released on March 11, with "Speak Low" among its fourteen tracks, gave the trio Performance of the Year and Best Jazz & Crossover Single on March 14. Press reports described it as a three-piece jazz group praised for a well-finished album, and a winners' relay concert called Music Forest at the Baekam Art Hall in Seoul's Samseong-dong opened on April 6 with Triologue, which a newspaper preview said offered delicate playing and a Pat Metheny-like sensibility. On August 4, 2006 the trio played the first night of the free Mirror Pond Jazz Festival at the National Museum of Korea, on a bill with the Brazilian vocalist Itamara Koorax, who was making her first Korean appearance. In July 2010 Kim Changhyun and Oh Jong-dae were both chosen for the Leaders' Poll Concert at the LIG Art Hall in Seoul, an all-star evening of players picked in a poll of 3,000 voters that included readers of the magazine Jazz People, jazz-club regulars and music students.

The second album took ten years. Too Soon Too Late (너무 이른, 또 늦은) was issued by Mirrorball Jazz World as MJW0129, with a December 2014 date on Discogs, and reached the streaming services on March 19, 2015. Its release text says the three members had meanwhile become leading figures of Korean jazz, as performers, studio players and professors. It has twelve tracks, eleven of them originals: eight by Kim Min-seok and the three month pieces "3月_May", "7月_July" and "11月_November" by Kim Changhyun, plus an arrangement of Lee Morgan's "Ceora". Unlike the first album it adds piano, accordion and strings to the trio, with a string quartet on the title track and the pianist Yu Seung-ho, who plays with Kim Changhyun and Oh in the Neo Traditional Jazz Trio, on accordion for "Till U Here", "Waltz for Yoon" and "7月_July". The cover art builds on the animator Jeong Hyeon-jeong's 2014 work Dot, Line, Plane (점선면). Bugs picked it as its album of the month for April 2015, and Kim Gwang-hyeon, reviewing it on April 28, 2015, wrote that the trio sounded as relaxed as ever and hoped for a third album within five years.

No third album appears on Discogs, Bugs, Apple Music or Spotify, and no concert notice for the trio after the 2015 release was found. No source gives a formation date, a hometown for the group or a birth year for any member, and the trio has not published a biography of its own. Its story otherwise overlaps with Kim Changhyun's, whose profile covers both albums from the bassist's side.

No interview in which the members name their influences was found, so this section reports what the reviewers heard. Kim Gwang-hyeon placed the trio in the line of guitar-led duos and trios that run from Jim Hall, Joe Pass and Wes Montgomery to Pat Metheny and John Scofield, and said the acoustic-guitar sound at the center of Speak Low recalls the 1997 duo album by Metheny and Charlie Haden. He heard the Bill Evans and Jim Hall record of 1963 in "Oblivion", Jim Hall in his Telarc period in "Memories", and Bill Frisell more than Metheny in "Hypnosis".

The leader's guitar sets the tone, but Kim Min-seok said the three musicians hold equal shares of the music, and the reviewer answered that the trio cannot be divided. The players' own comment in the release text is that the highest praise would be to call their music suitable for falling asleep to, quiet and plain music that lets a listener look back over ordinary days without breaking into a conversation. Seoul Shinmun, previewing the 2006 concerts, described sensitive jazz playing that was credited with opening new possibilities for Korean jazz in a thin market for instrumental music.

Too Soon Too Late keeps the trio's core and widens the palette, with Latin-tinged pieces such as "Brazilian Suite" and "Caprico", an accordion on three tracks and a string quartet on the title track. Bugs files it as contemporary jazz and crossover jazz.