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While browsing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she asked for pianos with the top removed to make it easier to get inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if any more recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. And though she had long since retired some time before, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through meditative practices all were evident 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 artist attempting to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, reveals that that drive stretched back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she merges these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an artist in full control. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck call Williams "a top-tier 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 dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards 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 met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. After time 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 relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the great promise of the internet