Seoul Jazz Festival fills Olympic Park with 60 acts

In three lines.

• The 18th Seoul Jazz Festival 2026 ran from May 22 to 24 at Olympic Park.
• The final count on stage was 60 acts.
• The names stretched wide — from jazz legends like Herbie Hancock to SEVENTEEN's DK X SEUNGKWAN, Epik High, Jang Beom June with hyukoh, and Yerin Baek.

The 18th edition, and that number 60

Seoul Jazz Festival reaches its 18th edition this year. Eighteen rounds means that, by now, a lot of people can't picture early-summer Olympic Park without this name attached to it. This year's run was three days, May 22 to 24, with 60 acts taking the stage.

The number 60 starts to make sense once you split it across three days. It means several stages running at once, and it means no single person can catch all 60. So everyone's path splits. What you see and what you give up becomes the story of your day. The festival has already begun the moment you spread out the map and circle times on the schedule. The time spent walking between stages, the time spent sitting on the grass waiting for the next act — all of it fits inside those three days.

The name says jazz, and then goes past it

The breadth of the lineup stands out. There's Herbie Hancock, long called a jazz legend, and there's SEVENTEEN's DK X SEUNGKWAN unit. Epik High, Jang Beom June with hyukoh, and Yerin Baek land on the same list too. It carries the banner of a 'jazz festival,' but the actual lineup reaches well past jazz.

Right at the center of the lineup — one song from jazz legend Herbie Hancock, first.

This is the festival's long-standing way. It leans toward not fussing over boundaries as long as the stage is good, rather than guarding genre purity. People who came for jazz and people who came to see a favorite singer mix on the same lawn, and that mixing became the festival's color. While a keyboard improvisation flows on one stage, a crowd singalong spreads on the next. Names you'd rarely find in one place get set down in the same three days, so you might stumble, by chance, onto a stage outside your usual taste. The reason it's been loved for so long is probably somewhere in here.

That's the last of the numbers. Now, the music. Sixty stages means 60 different nights. Same park, same day, yet a picture of people scattered around, each caught by a different song. Someone spent their three days in front of Herbie Hancock's keys, someone else in front of a favorite singer's voice. If your steps out of the park felt a little lighter as you hummed the song you'd just heard, then that stage did its part.