Liz Story has established herself as one of the most distinctive composers and solo pianists of new instrumental music that emerged in the 1980s.

A native of California, Liz began her classical musical training as a child. When her family moved to Germany during her teens, she added languages, philosophy, and poetry to her classical music studies.

Upon her return to the United States, Liz moved to New York City, where she intended to continue her formal classical piano studies at Hunter College. But an outing with friends one night to the infamous music club The Bottom Line would forever change the trajectory of Liz's musical studies and of her career. The headliner that night was the legendary jazz pianist Bill Evans, with whom Liz was unfamiliar at the time. Struck by Evans' musical improvisation, Liz recalls, "It was suddenly clear how I was to study music." After the show she approached Evans and asked if he taught jazz. He did not, he told her, but recommended Sanford Gold, one of the premier jazz piano teachers of his time, who shortly thereafter took Liz on as a student. Later moving back to Southern California, Liz studied at the Dick Grove Music Workshops in Studio City.

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During her studies in Southern California, Liz decided that she might be able to improve her sight-reading skills by finding a job playing piano in a restaurant. "I stopped at all these different restaurants, but most of them wanted me to be able to do requests, which I couldn't do." Finally, Adagio restaurant in Los Angeles hired Liz. "The first night I brought a stack of sheet music with me to play. But when I arrived at the restaurant, the old upright piano they had was missing its entire front casing. You could see the piano strings and hammers, and there was nowhere to put the sheet music. The manager of the restaurant came up and said, 'Start playing.' I was actually too panic-stricken to say I couldn't do it. So I sat down and started to pretend to play the piano."

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After work, Liz would return home and develop the ideas she had improvised earlier at the restaurant. These ideas later developed into compositions, which found their way onto tape and into the hands of Will Ackerman, the founder of the record label Windham Hill. After hearing Liz's work he signed her to record what would become her debut album, Solid Colors, released in 1983. Between 1983 and 2005, Liz released ten full-length albums: seven albums of primarily original solo piano compositions (Solid Colors, Unaccountable Effect, Part of Fortune, Speechless, Escape of the Circus Ponies, 17 Seconds to Anywhere, and Night Sky Essays); two albums of jazz standards (My Foolish Heart and Liz