Yonglee & The Doltang (용리와 돌아온 탕자들, shortened in Korea to 용리와 돌탕) is a Seoul quintet of improvising musicians led by the pianist and composer Yonglee (용리, born Lee Yong-hyun, 이용현). Its lineup is Yonglee on piano and electric piano, Youngwoo Lee (이영우) on synthesizer and electronics, Yechan Jo (조예찬) on guitar, Hwansu Kang (강환수) on bass and Dayeon Seok (석다연) on drums. The band bills itself as yonglee & the DOLTANG on its own releases and calls its music progressive rock and improvisation, and Korean press calls it a jazz band. It was formed in 2023, released its first album, Invisible Worker, on Unit Records on May 1, 2025, and on April 25, 2026 won the Deutscher Jazzpreis (German Jazz Prize) for Debut Album of the Year, International.

The leader

Yonglee was born in Jeonju, in North Jeolla province, and grew up listening to rock before drums and keyboards pulled him toward jazz. He left Korea to study in 2009, took a bachelor's degree at the Berklee College of Music and a master's degree at the New England Conservatory on a scholarship, and was a CJ Cultural Foundation music scholar in the foundation's overseas graduate-school category in 2016 and 2017. The foundation says he worked as an artist in Boston and New York for eight years. Korean and Austrian profiles name the Jazz Gallery, Cornelia Street Cafe and Smalls among the New York rooms where he played. He returned to Korea in 2020, during the pandemic, and has been based in Seoul since.

Back in Korea he released two records under his own name in 2021. Touch appeared on June 29, 2021, with a CD following on July 12. It holds nine pieces he composed and arranged, and its guests included the tenor saxophonist Walter Smith III and the guitarist Max Light, plus the saxophonist Jacob Shulman, the vocalist Tammy Scheffer, the bassist Simon Willson and the drummer Kayvon Gordon, who were named by the Jeonbuk Ilbo as taking part. In that interview he said he wanted to become a pianist like Keith Jarrett, who moved from jazz standards into orchestral writing and experimental work. Surface of Time followed in December 2021, four tracks made up of an intro and three parts, "Limitation," "Extension" and "Eternality." The band's biography says the Korean jazz magazine MM Jazz named it a best album of 2022, and his work drew a creativity grant from the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture. He also played the Jeonju Sori Festival after returning.

He has said that before the band he played piano in lounges, where he felt less like a musician than like staff hired to maintain a room's atmosphere. He told Newsis in June 2026 that this time pushed him to ask why a sound should be made at all, and that it is the source of the album title Invisible Worker.

The band

The solo records left him wanting a band. A festival booking in 2023 gave him the push, and he gathered four players who were each already counted among Korea's next generation of musicians. Yonglee told the CJ Cultural Foundation that the name was a stopgap for the first show, that friends objected to it as religious and unfashionable, and that he was drawn to it for exactly that reason. He told Newsis that "returned prodigals" carries some self-mockery and humor, a story about people who keep coming back to music even though it can feel inefficient and out of step with the time. The workshop biography issued for the band's 2024 Vienna visit describes the other members. Youngwoo Lee studied at the Conservatory of Amsterdam and has played the North Sea Jazz Festival with the Sunmi Hong Quartet, and the CJ Cultural Foundation lists him as another of its music scholars. Kang studied at the New School and the Manhattan School of Music, played with the saxophonist Billy Harper's quartet and was named a Rising Star of Korean jazz by Jazz People magazine in 2021. Seok studied at Berklee and New York University, performed with the project of the trumpeter Dave Douglas and Elan Mehler and went on a European tour with the saxophonist Timo Vollbrecht, and the CJ Cultural Foundation names Seok as the head of SS:umic (쑤믹), an organization for improvisers that held a festival in August 2025.

In 2024 the group was already working abroad before it had released a record. Its representatives told Newsis that it was the only Asian act invited to the jazzahead! trade fair that year, when it did not have a single out, and that it played the Jarasum Jazz Festival and toured Germany, Austria and Hungary. On April 18, 2024 it gave an ensemble workshop at the Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna, with the vocalist Song Yi Jeon replacing the guitarist for that session. Its biography at the time also listed the Ulsan Jazz Festival and the Opus Jazz Club at the Budapest Music Center.

Invisible Worker

Invisible Worker was recorded on July 26 and 27 and November 29 and 30, 2024 at the KT&G SSMD Live Studio in Chuncheon, engineered by Dong Hee Lee, mixed and mastered by Alistair Payne and produced by Yonglee. All nine tracks are Yonglee's compositions, except the opening "S50und P61ant7," which he wrote with Youngwoo Lee. The title of that one-minute opener contains the number 50617, which Yonglee told Newsis is the number of performers registered with the Korea Music Performers Association, a figure that stood for an anonymous individual and for the many people working to keep music going. Song Yi Jeon sings on "Fluorescent Light" and "Dopamine Rush." The band lists the subjects as the anxiety before a payday ("Pay Day"), a person lying exhausted under the light while an insect flies toward it ("Fluorescent Light"), the graph of a stock portfolio ("Drops") and the wish to break out of constraints ("Shell"). The first single, "Shell," came out on April 3, 2025. The package carries a liner note by Seymour Euge, with photography by Hyun Park and artwork by Stefanie Kunckler.

Reviewers outside Korea took notice. François van de Linde, writing in Jazz Journal on June 5, 2025, called the band an eccentric offshoot of neo-fusion, hearing synth excursions like those of Joe Zawinul and Paul Bley alongside the Flaming Lips and Cornelius, and said he wanted more melody. Freq's Mr Olivetti, on May 12, 2025, heard jazz, prog and the heavier, more awkward end of the American underground, with Yonglee alternating between acoustic and electric piano and a drummer who keeps the rhythm on the rails, and called the record a fantastic introduction to an unexpected genre.

Touring and the 2026 prizes

The CJ Cultural Foundation, which backs both Yonglee and Youngwoo Lee, presented the band at its Korea in Focus with CJ showcase at the Maschinenhaus in Berlin on June 13, 2025, and hosted the album-release showcase at CJ Azit in Seoul on June 29. The foundation reports a tour of eleven concerts in six European countries after the release. A concert listing on Jamboree counts the same eleven concerts across nine cities and names the Bimhuis in Amsterdam, the Enter Enea festival in Poland, Ronnie Scott's in London and a Polish club called Jassmine. Newsis lists the Netherlands, Britain and Poland for 2025.

In February 2026 the album was nominated for Best Jazz Instrumental Album at the 23rd Korean Music Awards, whose prize on February 26 went to the pianist Mijung Lim for Impromptu. On April 25, 2026 the band won its category of the Deutscher Jazzpreis, awarded in Bremen during the 20th jazzahead!; the other international winners that night included Johnathan Blake's My Life Matters for album of the year. In a June 2026 interview Yonglee said the recognition made the album title feel more accurate, because the unseen time before any result is always longer. In summer 2026 the band was part of the Korea guest-country program at Jazz Fest Budapest, playing the Sopron festival on July 1 and Rákóczi Square on July 3, alongside the vocalist Nah Youn-sun, the pianist Cho Yoon-seung, the Near East Quartet and the One Mind Trio. A festival listing also names Norway's Nattjazz among its summer dates.

The band joins the odd meters and distortion of progressive rock and metal to jazz improvisation and electronics. Newsis likens the band's precision to Dream Theater, Yonglee says he grew up on progressive metal bands, and Choi Seung-in, a member of the Korean Music Awards selection committee, wrote that the record fuses jazz with rock, progressive and electronic sound without the sound scattering. The writer of the album's liner note says Yonglee speaks two languages at once, the harmony and counterpoint of the keyboard and the muscular energy of rock, with the openness of jazz mediating between them, and that the band keeps just enough roughness to avoid sounding polished. Yonglee defines jazz as the paradox that freedom requires breaking forms while improvisation requires a form both players understand, and says rehearsals are mostly about the direction of energy and density of tension, with instructions like "go as if you might fall apart a little." Newsis notes that he has cited Miles Davis as the kind of innovator who breaks received frames, and he wants the music to carry the spirit of its time, including the pressure on young people in Korea now.

Discogs files Invisible Worker under Jazz with the styles Fusion and Jazz-Rock, Apple Music under Crossover Jazz, and Bandcamp tags it jazz and progressive rock. The competing identity is progressive rock, which the band's own tagline claims, but its prize, its Korean Music Awards nomination in a jazz category, its jazz festival and jazz club bookings and its jazz-press reviews all place it in the jazz scene.