VYTAUTAS STRAIŽYS — BIOGRAPHY

Vytautas Straižys sat down at the piano at the age of seven. Twelve years at the National M.
K. Čiurlionis School of Arts were spent in the classical repertoire; at thirteen he appeared
as a soloist with the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra under Saulius Sondeckis, in a concert
broadcast on Lithuanian national television. Jazz arrived when he was nine, first through
recordings by Bill Evans, Chick Corea and Miles Davis. After school he chose the second path
and continued his jazz studies in the Netherlands, at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague
and at Codarts in Rotterdam.

He has spent close to half his life abroad. For five years he played piano on cruise ships,
living in a cabin of four square metres and going ashore in New York and Cuba. In the
Netherlands he performed and taught. He returned to Vilnius with a repertoire in which the
classical tradition and jazz improvisation are not two separate things.

In 2019 the voice joined the piano. Since then Straižys both plays and sings in concert, and
the Vilnius jazz scene lists him under both names. His repertoire reaches from Rachmaninoff,
Chopin and Debussy to Bill Evans and Oscar Peterson, from jazz standards to the sung
classics.

One of his central specialisations is the music of Bill Evans. Straižys has presented a full
solo Evans programme at festivals more than once, among them the Kristupas Festival in the
Bernardine Garden in Vilnius; separately he plays the same music in a quartet with Deimantas
Balys, Aliaksei Kryshtal and Jonas Filmanavičius.

He performs solo, in duo with singers and with ensembles, and has played more than twenty
concerts with the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra. Viktorija Gečytė, Kotryna Juodzevičiūtė,
Eivilė Miceikaitė, Godo Yorke and Marija Arutiunova have sung with him. His harmonisation of
the folk song “Vai nekukuok” was recorded in 2013 on Rugilė Daujotaitė’s collection “Three
Lithuanian Folk Songs”.

In the summer of 2026 he appeared at the VilkiJAZZ festival in duo with Godo Yorke. He has
been a guest on LRT Klasika and LRT Radio many times since 2016, and in 2024 an entire
episode of the LRT television programme “Nepaprasti žmonės” was devoted to him.

In the summer of 2023, in the Tower quarter of Vilnius, he began giving concerts in his own
home; more than eighty were held over two years. In November 2025 this grew into the
Downtown Piano Lab music club. Straižys has taught piano since 2007, and his students today
join from Australia, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States.
