Younee (유니) is a pianist, singer and composer born in Seoul, South Korea, on October 20 in a year that German Wikipedia gives only as around 1985. Her YouTube channel and a Korean magazine credit give her Korean name as Kwak Yu-ni (곽유니), and every one of her releases is billed simply Younee. She trained in Seoul, made her first career there as a pop singer-songwriter, moved to London in 2008 and has lived in Germany since 2013, most recently in Bavaria. A 2024 Steinway biography adds that she has recently been granted German citizenship, while her own channels and Korean coverage still present her as a South Korean artist. She calls her music "Free Classic & Jazz," and that phrase is also the plainest statement of how strong the jazz basis is: real, documented, and shared with classical music rather than exclusive to it.

Sources disagree on when she began, giving ages from three to five for her first piano lessons. A BBC radio profile from 2009 says she spent about twenty years on classical piano, at Yewon School, Seoul Arts High School and finally Yonsei University, where she took a degree in classical piano. German Wikipedia names Soo-Jung Shin as one of her teachers there. Den Magazine's 2025 interview adds that she explored pop, rock and jazz while still a classical student and won a gold prize at the Yoo Jae-ha Music Competition, a Korean contest for singer-songwriters.

In Korea she performed under the name 키스피아노, which English-language sources render as Key's Piano. German Wikipedia lists Love (Key's Piano Vol. 1, EMI Music Korea, 2006), Den Magazine adds French Kiss (2007), and German Wikipedia also says she wrote pop songs for other Korean artists, among them the theme song of the 2006 KBS drama Famous Princesses. The jump to jazz came through the American pianist Bob James. According to the BBC text, a German fan put her in touch with him, he invited her to play a demanding four-hands piece with him on a Korean television programme, and when she said she wanted an international career he suggested the London-based American producer and arranger Richard Niles.

True To You (2009) was the result. Niles produced it in London and played guitar on it, and the credits list Gary Husband on drums, Nigel Hitchcock on saxophones, Richard Cottle on organ, Fender Rhodes and synthesizer, Derek Watkins on trumpet, Skaila Kanga on harp, Robert Rickenberg on bass and the London Orchestra on strings, with Younee on piano and all vocals. Ben Fenner engineered, mixed and mastered it at Nucool Studio in London. It is a twelve-song album of her own pop-leaning material and Discogs files it under Jazz, Pop and Classical. In October 2009 she toured Britain with the Richard Niles Quartet: a date at The Stables in Wavendon on October 24 and three nights at the Pizza Express Jazz Club in Soho from October 27 to 29, which doubled as the album launch. BBC Radio 3's Jazz Line-up had her on air with the presenter Claire Martin that autumn, playing a few numbers live.

Germany changed the music. A 2026 concert listing says she signed with a German label in 2013 and moved to the country, and German Wikipedia places her in Würzburg from that year. Her German debut, Jugendstil (August 8, 2014), was recorded at the Emil Berliner Studios in Berlin and takes fifteen well-known classical pieces by Mussorgsky, Beethoven, Bizet, Dvorak, Chopin, Debussy, Mozart, Smetana, Bach, Rachmaninoff, Handel, Clementi and Paganini as starting points for her own jazz-inflected variations. My Piano (April 8, 2016) is a double album of eleven original piano compositions plus a bonus disc with two songs and a live improvisation, the live material taken from the 2014 Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival and an Ansbach concert in 2015. German Wikipedia lists reviews in Schall, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Piano News around it, and the Steinway biography says both albums reached the top of the bestseller charts.

Her live work moved toward improvisation. At her concerts she asks the audience for a word or an idea and plays a piece built on it, a method she describes in a 2024 interview with The Tonearm. The Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg (March 5, 2020), the Palatia Jazz Festival in a cathedral, the jazz club Unterfahrt in Munich, and the Steinway Spirio Studio in Hamburg (a livestream on November 28, 2024) are among the stages she has played. The double album Improvisations Live in Germany (November 1, 2024, Fulminantmusic, catalogue FM003CD) collects twenty of those solo improvisations, each with a short spoken introduction, recorded in German halls and clubs between 2016 and 2022 according to the label text. Reviewers placed it in jazz terms: George W. Harris of Jazz Weekly compared the approach to Keith Jarrett's concert improvisations, and Oscar Groomes of O's Place Jazz gave it a score of 85.

Beyond her own albums, Discogs lists one guest appearance, on piano on the track "Wahrheit" of the German rapper Fage MC's album Verderb Und Gedeih (Zumby Music, 2012). She is listed as a Steinway Artist and her own site announces concerts across Germany.

Younee describes a classical foundation that supplies technique, dynamics and structure, with jazz adding freedom, harmony and groove, and she names rock energy, funk and tango as further ingredients. She says she does not set out to mix genres; the elements she loves come together as she plays. She prefers "Free Classic & Jazz" to labels such as crossover or neoclassical, and the term grew out of a conversation with a German newspaper in which she compared the freedom she finds inside classical music to that of free jazz.

On the scope question, the case for jazz is substantial. Her recordings are filed under Jazz and Free Improvisation on Discogs, jazz clubs and jazz festivals book her, a BBC jazz programme and jazz-specific reviewers have covered her, and the whole of Improvisations Live in Germany is spontaneous composition on the Jarrett model. The case against is just as real. Her training is classical, her first career was pop, Jugendstil is built on classical repertoire, and she does not call her music jazz without the word classic beside it. This profile treats her as a classical-trained improviser whose work sits on the jazz side of the line often enough to belong here, with the crossover and Third Stream tags marking the mixture.

Her own references run from Bach and Beethoven to Bill Evans, whose music she hears as sharing qualities with Chopin, and to Keith Jarrett, with whom the German and Korean press compare her. Den Magazine headlined its 2025 interview with her as a Keith Jarrett for a new era. She says the pop years taught her to tell a whole story in three or four minutes, and that the London sessions with British jazz players loosened what she calls stiffness in her groove.