Claudio Cojaniz was born August 16, 1952, in Palmanova, in Italy's Friuli region, near Udine. He trained classically in piano, organ and composition, a background biographical sources describe as coming "from musica dotta" (composed, conservatory music), before turning toward jazz. He played with the youth orchestra network Gioventù Musicale Italiana until 1982 and made his first recording under his own name that same year. He went on to teach at the Istituto Musicale del Seminario di Udine and has also recorded under the nickname "Jan," the name behind the one-off Discogs group entity Jan Trio '98.

Alongside his jazz career, Cojaniz built a substantial parallel life as a composer: he won Japan's Irino Prize in 1990 for his composition "Spheres," written for a national symphony orchestra in Tokyo, and wrote music for RAI 2's program Mixer as well as for film, dance and theatre productions.

His earliest documented recordings sit at the free-improvisation end of his catalog: Metronomes (Prelude To A Magic Night) (1983, Tactus), recorded at two different Friuli venues in a single year, and Tarahumara (1988, Tunnel Records), a quintet-plus-voice session co-led with Udine saxophonist Bruno Romani that Discogs tags Free Jazz and Contemporary Jazz. Romani, later profiled on this project, returned the following year for Ramo Ramo (Ypnosisetnomuzik) (1989).

His first stable working trio arrived with Hasta Siempre (1994, C.M.C. Records), recorded live in September 1993 at Milan's Bourbon Street club with bassist Giovanni Maier and drummer U.T. Gandhi, a rhythm section he had already used on the earlier live album Due (1993), which carries liner notes from pianist Giorgio Gaslini. Les Illuminations (1997, Splasc(h) Records), recorded across the border at Radio Koper's studios in Capodistria, Slovenia, paired him in duo with fellow Friulian pianist Giorgio Pacorig, described in one biographical source as his "conterraneo," a shared-home-region collaborator.

In 2004 Cojaniz began what would become his longest and most productive label relationship, opening his Caligola Records account with War Orphans, a duo album with trombonist Giancarlo Schiaffini. By Orfani in 2022, his sixteenth title for the label in eighteen years, a review in the Italian jazz magazine Romain Jazz called the run "an absolute record in the Caligola roster." Three further Caligola albums since then, Black (2023), Madeleine (2024) and Cracking (2025), have extended that total past nineteen titles.

The Caligola years produced several recurring bands. Intermission Riff (2008) and Beat Spirit (2009), the latter featuring vocalist Lorenzo Acquaviva and, on tenor saxophone and clarinet, Francesco Bearzatti, already profiled on this project, both grew out of his N.I.O.N. Orchestra (Not In Our Name) project, a Eu-Ritmica production based in Udine whose personnel across Beat Spirit, Howl (2010) and Fascinating Journey (2012, Jazzit Records) included bassists Danilo Gallo and Romano Todesco, drummer Zeno De Rossi, percussionist Luca Grizzo, Schiaffini again on trombone, American trumpeter Cuong Vu, violinist Alexander Balanescu and, again, Bearzatti. Marmaduke (2009, Splasc(H) Records) paired him with guitarist Maurizio Brunod and drummer and vibraphonist Massimo Barbiero, who returned in 2013 for the live album Danza Pagana, recorded at Ivrea's Open Jazz Festival. Shadows Of Colours (2011) is a solo recording on the historic Mascioni pipe organ of Venice's Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. Dreiländer Trio (2012, Palomar Records), recorded live in San Vito al Tagliamento, brought together Cojaniz, Maier and the Slovenian percussionist Zlatko Kaučič, a three-country lineup its title names directly.

The Heart Of The Universe (2012), billed to Cojaniz's A.P. Trio, introduced double bassist Alessandro Turchet and drummer Luca Colussi, and began what has become his single most frequent and longest-running partnership. Turchet, already profiled on this project, appears on at least eight Discogs-documented Cojaniz releases from 2012 to 2025: The Heart Of The Universe and Fascinating Journey (both 2012), Si Song - Una Canzone Per Siso and Sound Of Africa (both 2017, the latter two billed to the Turchet-Colussi trio Coj & Second Time), Molineddu (Les Lieux Magiques) (2018), Orfani (2022), the piano-bass duo Madeleine (2024), which closed Caligola's "Jazz Piano Duets" series with seven originals and a version of Thelonious Monk's "'Round Midnight," and Cracking (2025, again with Colussi, billed to the A.P. Trio). Turchet's own profile calls the partnership "his longest partnership," a description this build's Discogs research independently corroborates.

Other Caligola-era work includes Blue Africa (2013) and Blue Question (For M & M) (2019), both with double bassist Franco Feruglio, the same Udine conservatory teacher who later trained Turchet on the instrument, and the three-volume solo piano Stride series (Vol. 1, 2014; Vol. 2, 2016; Vol. 3 - Live, 2017), each recorded on a different historic instrument. Balkan Blues Piano (2020, Caligola Dig) grew out of a co-production with the City of Asylum cultural center in Pittsburgh, where Cojaniz has performed repeatedly, including a 2022 evening in which American saxophonist Oliver Lake joined his trio to play repertoire from Lake's own collective Trio 3.

Black (2023) introduced a newer rhythm section, bassist Mattia Magatelli and drummer Carmelo Graceffa. His most recent releases are Zec (2026, Caligola), a duo with cellist Antonino Puliafito, and the 2025 A.P. Trio album Cracking.

Cojaniz's catalog runs continuously through Discogs' Free Jazz and Avant-Garde Jazz style tags from his earliest 1980s solo and duo recordings through his trio work in the 2010s and 2020s, a free-jazz identity built inside Friuli's regional scene rather than the more heavily chronicled Rome or Milan circuits. Two long-running duo and trio partnerships bracket that catalog: an early one with saxophonist Bruno Romani in the late 1980s, and, since 2012, a much longer and more heavily recorded one with double bassist Alessandro Turchet. Running alongside the small-group free-jazz work is a separate solo-piano identity, the three-volume Stride series, that engages directly with the stride-piano tradition its title names, and a body of large-ensemble and non-jazz composition, the N.I.O.N. Orchestra, the Irino Prize-winning orchestral piece "Spheres," and decades of film, dance and theatre scores, that sits outside the trio catalog entirely.