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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for making vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she asked for pianos with the top removed to make it easier to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if any more recordings existed. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. And though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician attempting to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, shows that that impulse extended back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she honed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an artist in total mastery. This is exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She was given her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later describe Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet