Youn Sun Nah

Born in Seoul in 1969, Youn Sun Nah has forged a career between South Korea and France, where she settled in the mid-1990s to study jazz and chanson in Paris after beginning her stage career in the musical Subway Line 1. Trained at several Parisian schools, she later taught at the CIM Jazz School and launched her own quintet, YSN 5tet, before making a name for herself in French clubs, theaters and festivals. Her discography traces this evolution with Reflet (2001), Light for the People (2002), Down by Love (2003), So I Am... (2004), followed by Memory Lane (2007) and Voyage (2008). From Same Girl (2010) and Lento (2013), Youn Sun Nah developed a very open vocal jazz that blends song forms, chanson and acoustic folk with improvisation, reimagined covers and a tightly controlled attention to nuance. Her subsequent albums include She Moves On (2017), Immersion (2019), Waking World (2022) and Elles (2024), recorded with Jon Cowherd. She has also collaborated with Olivier Ode and Nguyên Lê, and her work is firmly rooted in both the European and Korean jazz scenes.