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Perusing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she required pianos lacking the lid to allow her to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that rarely made it on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if any more recordings existed. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Although she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based 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 escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, shows that that desire stretched back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she merges these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she honed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an improviser in full control. That's thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew 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 turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – 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 remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 huge potential of the internet