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Perusing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was best known for creating vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she required pianos with the top removed to facilitate to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if any more recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Even though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been public about her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician seeking to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in complete command. It’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 received her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering 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.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck call 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, 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 quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain 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

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet