Yun Seokcheol (윤석철) is a Seoul-born jazz pianist and composer who leads the Yun Seokcheol Trio and has worked for two decades on both sides of the line between Korean jazz and Korean pop. He was born on April 10, 1985, and is 41 years old. He is also written Yun Seok-cheol (the spelling used by Wikipedia), Yun Seok Cheol (Discogs) and Yoon Seok-cheol; his own records and his YouTube channel bill him as Yun Seokcheol and the group as YUNSEOKCHEOL TRIO.

Korean Wikipedia's account of his early years, which draws on his interviews, says he fell for jazz at about the age of nine, when his father played Chuck Mangione's Feels So Good on the car stereo, and that he took up the piano in the second year of middle school because he wanted to become a composer. A guitar academy that also offered composition lessons sent him to a jazz piano teacher, and he stayed with jazz. He played in a school rock band, and after he missed his first-choice university entrances he enrolled at JEI University (인천재능대학교) in Incheon, where he majored in jazz and, by his own telling, practised harder than anyone. English Wikipedia adds that he attended Daejin High School.

He began playing in Seoul's jazz clubs at about twenty and for more than seven years hosted a jam night at Club Evans in Hongdae, according to English Wikipedia's account of a 2015 interview. The bassist Jeong Sang-i (정상이) and the drummer Kim Young-jin (김영진) were players he kept meeting at Club Evans and Club Farm. Competitions gave him his first public notice: he won the grand prize at the 6th Ulsan Jazz Festival competition in 2005 and finished third overall at the Jarasum International Jazz Competition in 2008. Korean press says the magazine Jazz People put him in its 2009 Rising Star selection (English Wikipedia says nominated).

The Yun Seokcheol Trio's first album, Growth, was recorded around 2007 according to Korean Wikipedia and released in 2009; the press dates the group's formation to that year, and 2024 coverage called it the trio's fifteenth anniversary. Wikipedia quotes the stated aim as a jazz group that feels like a rock or indie band. The second album, Love Is A Song (2013, Mirrorball Jazz World), built its title piece on a tune by the Korean hip-hop and electronica producer DJ Soulscape, and it was nominated for Best Jazz and Crossover, Jazz Album at the 11th Korean Music Awards in 2014. A 2015 newspaper preview of the mini album 즐겁게, 음악. (November 2014) noted that the trio mixes electronic and hip-hop rhythms into the piano trio format and had been nicknamed the "enfant terribles" of Korean jazz. The EP 자유리듬 (Free Rhythm, May 19, 2016) was nominated in the same category at the 14th Korean Music Awards in 2017,. 4월의 D플랫 (Db in April, April 24, 2018) paired new pieces with remade older ones and added saxophone, flute, percussion, vibraphone and voices.

In April 2013 the trio appeared on the announced bill of the Korean concert for UNESCO's International Jazz Day at Olympus Hall in Seoul, beside the singer Youn Sun Nah and a band of first-generation Korean jazz players that included the pianist Shin Kwan-woong, the percussionist Ryu Bok-sung, the tenor saxophonist Kim Soo-yeol, the trumpeter Choi Sun-bae and the singer Kim Jun. English Wikipedia also lists invitations to the Takatsuki Jazz Festival in Japan and the Taichung Jazz Festival in Taiwan.

In March 2019 he signed with Antenna, the label led by the singer-songwriter Yoo Hee-yeol. That year the trio marked its tenth anniversary with SONGBOOK (December 11, 2019, Kakao M), a collection of its best-loved pieces and reworked versions, and a concert of the same name at Hyundai Card Understage on December 13. The five-track EP 익숙하고 일정한 (Familiar and Constant) followed in February 2022. In 2021 and 2022 the trio took part in the Studio360 production company's easy-listening instrumental series: a 7-inch single, 대합실을 위한 경음악 Vol. 1 (March 2021), with the tenor saxophonist Kim Oki among the players, and the six-track EP MUSIC FOR WAITING ROOMS Vol.1 (October 31, 2022). The trio's next full-length album, 나의 여름은 아직 안 끝났어 (My Summer's Not Over Yet), arrived on August 28, 2024, about two and a half years after the EP. Yun produced every track, ten pieces on summer themes; one piece, "Sonny never gets blue", is a tribute to the footballer Son Heung-min. The Korean Music Awards nominated it for Best Jazz, Instrumental Album at the 22nd awards in 2025. The winner was the Jihye Lee Orchestra's Infinite Connections. Melon, the streaming service, named the trio its Artist of the Month for October 2024.

Jazz is the base of a wider career. Korean Wikipedia lists his arranging, composing or keyboard credits on records by Zion.T, Crush, Baek Yerin, IU, Sam Kim, Kwon Jin-ah, Jang Hye-jin and Paul Kim, and English Wikipedia says the Zion.T and Crush single "Just" (2015) debuted at number one on the Gaon digital chart and stayed on it for 35 weeks. Discogs credits him on the 2020 album FREEBODY by the jazz and funk band Cadejo and on the 2025 Stellar Blade soundtrack EP. He plays keyboards in the four-piece indie band 안녕의 온도 (Temperature of Saying Hi) and produces under the name The BLANK Shop, whose album Tailor (September 17, 2020) has guests from the Korean pop world, among them Yerin Baek, 10CM, WONPIL and Lee Jin-ah. He has taught practical music at Dongduk Women's University and the jazz department of JEI University and lectures at Kukje University of Arts. He still holds a weekly live jam session, as Korean Wikipedia puts it, keeping music at the centre of his life.

His jazz is a piano trio of accessible songs, with the sharp melodic tunes of Korean pop, the swing of club jazz, bossa and samba touches, and the loop-based patterns of hip-hop and electronic production folded into live playing. The Korean Music Awards' note on Love Is A Song credits the trio with extending jazz by playing a DJ's looped track by hand, and the note on My Summer's Not Over Yet describes bright, singable melodies that suit listeners with no special interest in jazz. Discogs files his trio records as contemporary jazz and, for one, fusion.

A first album that Korean Wikipedia calls entirely traditional jazz gave way to records that used ideas from hip-hop and electronica, then to the pop-facing songbook approach of SONGBOOK and My Summer's Not Over Yet. In a 2024 podcast interview the trio's method was described as working without written scores: each member practises from the leader's MIDI demos before a show. He told the same programme that he follows Brazilian popular music (MPB) and wants to keep collaborating across genres.

Pop is a competing identity, and it is the reason he is better known to many Korean listeners as a producer and session keyboardist. The profile therefore places him as a jazz bandleader whose records, awards (three Korean Music Awards nominations in the jazz categories), club work and teaching are all in jazz, and whose pop work is a large second career.