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While browsing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was best known for producing lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she required pianos without the cover to make it easier to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two live, two studio creations. Even though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also included some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician trying to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, reveals that that impulse stretched back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in full control. It’s electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck refer to Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet