Yang Joon Ho (양준호) is a South Korean jazz pianist who has worked in Seoul since the early 1990s as a bandleader, session player, founding member of two groups and teacher. The jacket of his first album prints Yang Joon Ho Trio, which is the form used here, and the jacket of his second prints Joon Ho Yang Trio. Discogs files his credits under Joon-Ho Yang and, for one sideman credit, Yang Jun-ho, the Revised Romanization that some Korean press and database entries use. The Hangul is 양준호 throughout. His birth date and birthplace are not published. Newstomato in June 2022 and Yonhap in November 2023 both gave his age as 59, and Korean papers count age in more than one way, so the reports point to the first half of the 1960s without fixing a year.

According to the liner notes of his 2008 album, which are the fullest account of his early career, he studied classical music at university and came to jazz in the early 1990s. By the mid-1990s he was a busy studio pianist, and the notes mention a session on an album by the hip-hop group Deux (듀스). The first jazz band that made his name was the Seoul Jazz Quartet (서울재즈쿼텟), with the saxophonist Lee Jung-sik, the bassist Jang Eung-gyu (장응규) and the drummer Kim Hee-hyun. Newstomato says it grew out of casual playing in an empty office of the KBS band, gives 1989 to 1993 as the years of its real activity, and lists the clubs Pablo in Bangbae-dong and All That Jazz in Itaewon, then Hoam Art Hall, the Sejong Center and the Seoul Arts Center, and tours outside Seoul. A Discogs credit puts a Yang Jun-ho (양준호) on synthesizer on Lee Jung-sik's Love Sax (Jigu Records, 1993), which fits the quartet's years but names no other detail of the player.

In 1998 he founded a second group, The Quartet (더 쿼텟), with the guitarist Park Yong-gyu (박용규), the bassist Lee Soon-yong (이순용) and the drummer Lee Do-heon (이도헌). Its album First Morning came out in 2000, and its title piece "Morning", which he wrote, also appears on a Doremi Media sampler from the same year. The 2008 liner notes say the group broke up when its members went abroad to study. He then became music director of the Latin jazz group Cobana (코바나), and the same notes say he kept working with Juhan Lee, Lee Jung-sik and Park Seong-yeon, among others. Discogs credits a 양준호 as a featured player on "Twist Walk" on Juhan Lee's 10+1 (Ten Plus One) (2001); the credit gives no instrument, but the same notes name Lee as a collaborator of the pianist. The Seoul Shinmun named a Yang Jun-ho (양준호), with no instrument given, among the juniors and pupils who joined the first-generation players at the drummer Choi Se-jin's 70th birthday concert at LG Arts Center on September 5, 2000; the name and the date fit, but nothing in the article ties it to this pianist beyond that.

From the 2000s his regular band was the Yang Joon Ho Trio, with the bassist Kim Ho Choul, who is Hocheol Kim, and the drummer Lee Chang-hoon (이창훈). Their album Portrait in Bill Evans (STM, July 8, 2008) was, by the liner notes' count, the first record under his own name, about twenty years after he began playing jazz and eight years after First Morning. The notes say he had turned down several offers to record because he did not feel ready, and that he had taught jazz piano for ten years in the practical music departments of Kyung Hee University, Dongduk Women's University, the Seoul Institute of the Arts and Suwon Women's University. The album has fourteen tracks and runs about 79 minutes; the notes describe a tribute that surveys Bill Evans's early, middle and late periods, adds solo and duo pieces to the trio format, and includes three originals inspired by Evans's music. They say it was recorded in two days and that the jacket is filled with photographs he took himself. Its track list takes in "Waltz for Debby", "Alone Together", "Moon River", "Here's That Rainy Day" and "Love Theme from Spartacus", and a JazzPeople magazine supplement CD of March 2009 (JP-015, a survey of Korean jazz from 2008) carried the trio's "Waltz for Debby".

His second record took six years. Timeless Traveler (Joon Ho Yang Trio, released December 9, 2014 on Bugs, catalog OPC-0608 on Discogs) has thirteen tracks and about 69 minutes of music, and the Bugs notes say it holds more than ten of his own compositions. Twelve of the titles are numbered "Timeless Suite", and the thirteenth, "Estate", is the only one that is not. The trio here is Yang, the bassist Han Hyun-woo (한현우), who is based in New York, and Lee Chang-hoon, with the vocalist Shin So-yi (신소이) and the drummer Park Byung-woo (박병우) as guests on one track each. A studio video of the first suite credits the same three players and prints the label name Documents Inévitable on the cover. The Korean Music Awards named it one of six nominees for Best Jazz & Crossover Jazz Album at the 13th ceremony, in a list Pressian published on January 28, 2016 that also held BG Salon's 현재의 발견, Youngjoo Song's Reflection and BuYoung Lee's Little Star, which won the category. The trio played the album on episode 1150 of the EBS television series Space Gonggam (EBS 스페이스 공감), whose clips went online in September 2015. EBS described him there as a pianist who debuted in the early 1990s and is widely respected among Korean jazz players for a delicate, restrained touch, and as a self-declared follower of Bill Evans's lyricism.

He appears as a sideman on a few more dated records. He plays piano on Remember JP Lim (Kang & Music, 2011) by Jp Lim & Friends, a standards session with a quintet of Oh Jung-taek on bass, Yoo Young-so on drums and congas, Shindongjin on saxophone and Yim Jae-Pil on trumpet, and on two tracks, "Dogmeat Drunkenness" and "New Hope of a Teahouse", of Swinging Gyeongseong (Audioguy Records, April 15, 2014), the vocalist Kukchan Kim's swing treatment of songs by the colonial-era composer Kim Hae-song, with Lee Chang-hoon on drums. Both are credited on Discogs as Yang Jun-ho and Joon-Ho Yang. The Swinging Gyeongseong credit, with his regular drummer beside him, is the stronger of the two for identification.

His later public activity centres on the quartet he began with. Newstomato reported on June 15, 2022 that the four original members, Lee Jung-sik, Kim Hee-hyun, Jang Eung-gyu and Yang, would play a reunion set on June 18 at Gaucho, a music bar in Hapjeong, their first joint stage in 27 years, with a larger concert and an album of their own pieces both planned. Yonhap reported on November 9, 2023 that the sold-out 2022 reunion had been followed by a concert on November 19 at Arthall MAC in Mapo, Seoul, with guests Kim Jun and Maria Kim and a set that mixed Korean folk melodies with jazz, as part of the members' interest in a Korean-flavored jazz. No recording by the reunited quartet and no leader album after 2014 turned up. He is alive and was active as of the latest reports.

The name Yang Jun-ho is a very common one in Korea. He is none of the actors, athletes or politicians who share it, and the identification here rests on the 2008 liner notes, the Space Gonggam episode, the Newstomato and Yonhap features, and the release credits that tie the trio's players to him.

By his own account, Bill Evans is the pianist who shaped him most, and his first record was a tribute to Evans's trio. The liner notes describe his playing as delicate and neatly drawn, with pretty melodic lines that can still turn rhythmically strong, a modern sensibility that avoids difficulty for its own sake, and a speaking-voice phrasing in which each idea has a clear beginning, development and end. EBS described the music of Timeless Traveler as melody-centered and restrained, and set it as music a listener does not need to be a jazz specialist to enjoy; a critic quoted there, Lee Gyeong-jun, asked whether jazz must be music for devotees alone and answered that the album suggests otherwise.

The two trio albums differ in how they are built. Portrait in Bill Evans is largely standards and Evans repertoire with three originals, and Timeless Traveler is a set of numbered suites of his own pieces with one outside title. The rest of his documented work runs from the Seoul Jazz Quartet's club and concert-hall years and the Latin side of Cobana to sideman dates that range from vocal swing to a standards session.