Woon Jo (조운) is a Seoul jazz vocalist, bandleader and producer who sings New Orleans jazz. His first album under his own name, Lazy Sunday, came out on April 25, 2025, and in July 2026 he produced and sang on witness the legend of..., the second album by the Seoul second-line band SoWhat NOLA. His releases bill him as Woon Jo, his video titles print 조운 (Woon Jo), and the cover of his album spells the name WOONJO; Woon Jo is the form used here. He is also a tambourine player, and a Korean newsletter by a friend says his nickname is the "tambourine killer", perhaps because of the tambourines he has worn out at gigs.

His route into jazz was not a music school. According to the Korean newsletter Jazz Docent, written by Kim Hyo-jin, he graduated in business administration from Yonsei University in Seoul, where he started playing jazz in the student jazz club So What, and he joined SoWhat NOLA as its singer after some of the club's members formed it. The same newsletter names the guitarist Yooyoun Cho (조유윤), a fellow Yonsei student, as the band's founder. In his own interview with Kim, Woon Jo says he did not major in music, that he kept an office job after graduating and that he knew almost nobody in the jazz scene when he started. He describes the scene as welcoming to an outsider, and says what convinced him he was a working musician was the audience, because music nobody hears has no point for him. Kim says he worked for years at companies while leading the band, and that the last one was a start-up in audio AI.

SoWhat NOLA was formed in early 2018, according to the CJ Cultural Foundation, as a marching band built on the New Orleans second-line tradition, with a brass section and a rhythm section of two drummers. The foundation says it plays jazz clubs and has been invited to the Jarasum, Songdo Tribowl and Seoul Forest jazz festivals, and the band appears among the acts of its TUNE UP programme for new musicians (27th class, page dated February 6, 2026), listed as a New Orleans jazz and second-line act. The band's first album, Seouleans Function, came out on September 15, 2021. Woon Jo says in the interview that he thinks of the New Orleans repertoire as his own music as much as his compositions, because he can only deliver a lyric he feels himself, so the band's songs are his songs.

He left his last job on April 1, 2024 and decided to make a record that year. By his own account he put it off until November, when he booked a Seoul studio for February, with no songs written and no concept. The band gigged heavily in November and December, so he could rehearse the arrangements with the players and revise them day by day. Writing the English lyrics was the hard part, and he found it difficult to write the sorrow of "Blues in Heaven" because he had rarely been that sad. The album was recorded at Rêve Studio in Seoul by Byungseok Lee, with his tambourine and the band's backing vocals added afterwards, and he sent it to New Orleans for mixing and mastering by Chris Finney. Finney is described by Woon Jo, and by the label that released the 2026 band album, as a Grammy-winning engineer who has worked with Preservation Hall Jazz Band and Rebirth Brass Band. Woon Jo got in touch with him by email after Facebook and LinkedIn messages went unanswered.

Lazy Sunday has eight tracks, six of them his own compositions and lyrics and two standards that he describes as New Orleans tunes, "Bourbon Street Parade" by Paul Barbarin and "Ain't She Sweet" by Milton Ager and Jack Yellen. The quartet credited on the title track is Jinseong Park on piano, Dongmin Lee on bass, Gyeongtae Kim on drums and Taekeon Yoo on tenor saxophone, and the video for the title track casts him as the tambourine killer. "Lil' Dizzy's Cafe" came from a trip to New Orleans, where he went to hear the drummer Herlin Riley and ended up at a table with strangers who told him where to eat the best fried chicken in the city. The restaurant is Lil Dizzy's Cafe, open only for lunch, and he wrote a song about it that borrows the section and the first line of the lyric of Ray Charles's "Greenbacks". The spoken opening is the owner's sign-off line from the café's Instagram menu videos, and a lyric imagines Dizzy Gillespie enjoying a bite. He was told the café took its present name from Gillespie and from the owner's trumpet-playing child. He asked the owner for permission by direct message and received the answer "Sure, You Can." He announced a release showcase at the Entry55 club in Sadang, Seoul, for 2 p.m. on Sunday, May 11, 2025, an afternoon slot chosen to match the album's lazy-Sunday theme.

In 2023 he sang as the featured vocalist on the title track of tenor saxophonist Taekeon Yoo's album Welcome to New Orleans, released on November 15, 2023. In 2026 he produced SoWhat NOLA's second album, witness the legend of..., released on July 10, 2026 by the Seoul label POCLANOS. He is credited with vocals and tambourines, he arranged the band's version of the Duke Ellington and Juan Tizol standard "Caravan", and he composed, arranged and wrote the words for "One More Round" and a new recording of "Lazy Sunday", which closes the album. The album is a concept record about a legendary brass band that arrives in New Orleans and finds itself on Gyeongnidan Street in Seoul, with a march based on the rhythms of the Nonsan army training camp turned into a second-line.

His reference point is New Orleans. In his interview he names the drummer Herlin Riley, whom he went to hear, and Ray Charles, whose "Greenbacks" he borrowed from, and the album's lyric names Dizzy Gillespie. The CJ Cultural Foundation says SoWhat NOLA takes its inspiration from the last hundred years of New Orleans music, naming Louis Armstrong, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Wynton Marsalis and Rebirth Brass Band, and says the band is built for moving and dancing rather than sitting and listening. Woon Jo's own albums follow that line: Lazy Sunday mixes six of his originals with two standards, and the 2026 band album adds a Seoul street and a Korean army march to the New Orleans story. He writes his lyrics in English, and he says he can only sing a lyric he understands and feels. No review of either album was found, so this profile does not rate the music.