Jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams was already gigging in Philadelphia in her teens, playing with one of Duke Ellington's early small groups. Learning to compose and arrange while part of Andy Kirk's Clouds of Joy, Williams refined her own style of soulful, harmonically innovative music. By the mid ‘40s she was living in New York, where her apartment became a sort of salon for the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Tadd Dameron and Thelonious Monk. The deeply spiritual Williams began recording religious-themed jazz in the ‘60s and developed a sizable catalogue of recordings before her death in 1981.