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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was most famous for creating vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she required pianos with the top removed to allow her to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if any more recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. And though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to put together 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 facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through meditative practices all shone through 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 break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, shows that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker says 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 studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an improviser in full control. That's electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She was given her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned 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 similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys 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 disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as 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 main method of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet