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While browsing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was most famous for producing sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene 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 pluck the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if further recordings were available. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Even though she had long since retired previously, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist seeking to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, reveals that that drive reached back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she merges these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in full control. It’s electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She was given her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck refer to 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, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to learn about the genre – first, to the hipper sounds 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.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena 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."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career evolved into 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 going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the great promise of the internet