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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was most famous for making lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she requested pianos with the top removed to make it easier to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if any more recordings existed. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two studio creations. And though she had long since retired previously, she also included some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 artist attempting to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, shows that that impulse reached back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an performer in full control. That's thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later describe 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, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet