Luca Sestak was born on January 10, 1995, in Celle, Lower Saxony, and grew up in Karlsruhe, where he took classical piano lessons for close to ten years. By his own account he disliked the instrument at first. His father tried to teach him at eight, a teacher took over at nine and a half, and it was only when he was given a Beethoven sonata at about eleven and a half that playing became enjoyable. Jazz reached him through a demonstration disk on the family's digital piano, which carried a jazz-trio version of Bach's Solfeggio in C minor modeled on Eugen Cicero's treatment. The search that followed led him to blues, boogie-woogie and funk, and he has named James Booker, Vince Weber and Jamie Cullum as pianists he was fixated on for years.

He posted his first videos to YouTube in December 2006, at eleven, and the clips of a self-taught boogie-woogie player built an audience quickly: by March 2014 his earliest videos had passed 1.8 million views, and his own biography now cites more than 30 million views across his channel. In 2007 he traveled to the International Boogie Woogie Festival in Lugano, Switzerland, to hear Axel Zwingenberger. He made his first German television appearance in 2010 on the SWR program Kaffee oder Tee, the year his debut album Lost in Boogie came out on Jaunty Records, when he was fifteen. Prizes from those years include first prize at the regional Jugend musiziert contest in Karlsruhe and third prize at the Baden-Württemberg state round (both 2008), the German Pinetop Award as Discovery of the Year (2011), the SummerJazz prize of the Pinneberg festival (2012) and a Yamaha junior generation prize (2012). German Wikipedia adds that by the age of twenty he had played concerts and festivals in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Sweden, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and the United States, sharing bills with Vince Weber, Ben Waters, Silvan Zingg, Pete York, Bob Seeley and Frank Muschalle.

He moved to Mannheim to study popular music design at the Popakademie, where he met the bassist Alexander Broschek and the drummer Nicholas Stampf, who became his trio. The second album, New Way (2014, self-released), widened the frame on purpose: thirteen tracks, mostly originals, with an arrangement of a Chopin piece, Henry Butler's "Dr. James" and James Booker's "Put Out the Light" alongside boogie-woogie numbers, and Johannes Niklas on drums for two tracks. He described it at the time as a new way compared with his first CD, mixing blues and boogie with jazz, funk, pop and classical ideas.

In 2018 he became an endorsed artist of Kawai pianos and toured China for three weeks, and his biography also lists performances for the German federal president and the president of Ireland. Sony Music signed him in 2019. In October 2019 he was the support act on Tanita Tikaram's tour, with dates in Hamburg, Munich, Lustenau, Linz and Vienna. Right or Wrong, released on Okeh on May 29, 2020, is the most pop-oriented record he has made: twelve songs written or co-written by him, with Sestak on lead vocals, piano and keyboards, Broschek on bass, Stampf on drums, a horn section of Daniel Steigleder (saxophone), Thomas Weiland (trombone) and Valentin Binz (trumpet), and several different producers. English Wikipedia describes the album as heavily influenced by pop and jazz and notes comparisons to Jamie Cullum.

Lighter Notes (March 8, 2024) went back to the piano trio. Sestak, Broschek and Stampf recorded all eleven tracks live, with no click track or backing tracks, and the program pairs six Sestak originals with his arrangements of two pieces by Friedrich Gulda (one of them, "Sarcasmus," from Gulda's Play Piano Play), C.P.E. Bach's "Solfeggietto", Chopin's "Minute Waltz" and the traditional "House of the Rising Sun." Oli Parker adds trumpet on "Blame Game." For the quieter pieces he prepared the piano with felt and tape, citing the sound worlds of Ólafur Arnalds and Nils Frahm. MainlyPiano's Kathy Parsons gave it her highest recommendation and Take Effect scored it 8 out of 10.

On May 11, 2024, the trio, now with Michael Goldmann on bass and synthesizer, recorded direct to two-inch analog tape at Little Big Beat Studios in Liechtenstein; the session was issued as a hand-numbered limited vinyl edition of 500 on LoEnd Records, with a streaming edition titled Little Big Beat Studio Live Session following in 2025. The trio played the Gstaad New Year Music Festival in Lauenen in January 2025, where it also took a request for a Quincy Jones piece rehearsed an hour before the concert, and Sestak has appeared at the San Francisco International Boogie Woogie Festival at the SFJAZZ Center in several years from 2022 to 2025. Concert listings show trio dates in Grünstadt on November 21 and in Hannover on December 4, 2026.

Sestak is a pianist who sits between three traditions and is open about it. English Wikipedia files him as a blues and jazz-pop pianist, Discogs tags every one of his releases as boogie-woogie, AllMusic lists Right or Wrong under jazz, and his own biography names jazz, blues, funk and boogie-woogie blended with classical and pop. The boogie-woogie and blues grounding is the oldest and most public part of his career, built on the YouTube videos of his childhood, and German Wikipedia notes that he often gives the left hand lead duties, playing walking lines and runs instead of a fixed ostinato, as in his "Walk with the Devil," whose left hand draws on New Orleans piano. The jazz strand is real but is one of several: it comes through a first exposure to Eugen Cicero's jazz Bach, a stated liking for Oscar Peterson and Jacques Loussier alongside Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton and Ray Charles, a trio format with bass and drums, improvised passages, and the jazz-pitched arrangements of Friedrich Gulda, Bach and Chopin on Lighter Notes.

The pop side is just as plain on the record. Right or Wrong is a vocal pop album with a horn section, compared in print to the work of Jamie Cullum, and he has said that jazz, funk, pop, blues, hip-hop and electronic beats all shaped his music. Taken together, his work is closest to crossover jazz: a classically trained virtuoso who treats the piano as a stage for humor and quick changes of idiom, shaped by the jazz piano of Oscar Peterson and the blues of Ray Charles, both of whom he cites, though he has recorded little that is straight-ahead jazz. His own advice to students, in a 2024 interview, is to stop comparing, not to copy, and not to take oneself too seriously.