Kaunas Jazz Festival

For several years, Kaunas Jazz has been striving to become one of the established jazz events in Eastern Europe. The Kaunas Jazz Festival still faces a number of challenges, but jazz lovers see it as a milestone for the future of jazz in the eastern Baltic region.

Anyone hoping to attend the Kaunas Jazz Festival should hurry. Many tickets for the festival are already sold out, while others are being treated as rare finds. Kaunas is Lithuania’s second-largest city. Even today, it is considered an important center of business and trade. Usually, it is business trips or city breaks that fill the hotels and holiday apartments in Kaunas. However, the Kaunas Jazz Festival in Lithuania has a tradition stretching back almost twenty years and, alongside the summer festival in Vilnius, is one of the most spectacular events in the eastern Baltic region. In its 19th year, the city of Kaunas will celebrate its Kaunas Jazz Festival from April 30 to May 3, 2010. At various venues across Kaunas, charismatic singers will impress audiences, the double bass will set the underlying tone, and the saxophone will send the distinctive sound of jazz soaring skyward. In previous years, captivating voices such as those of Chico Freeman, David Sandborn and Elvin Jones have kept the night alive. The success of the jazz days in Kaunas, Lithuania, vindicated the organizers’ decision to stage such an unusual event as the Kaunas Jazz Festival in such an unusual city. After initial difficulties, the festival established itself as a prominent and popular event, surpassed only by its sister events in Lithuania in autumn and during the Christmas season.


This year, visitors to the Kaunas Jazz Festival can once again look forward to a varied program featuring artists from around 20 countries. The Kaunas Jazz Festival is considered uninhibited, spectacular, exciting, relaxed, casual and carefree.