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Flipping through the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was most famous for producing sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she requested pianos without the cover to make it easier to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if any more recordings existed. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also included some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through 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 trying to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, reveals that that impulse reached back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Soon 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 known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she blends these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an performer in total mastery. That's electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She received her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed 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. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck describe 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 trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to educate herself 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 encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the active 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 great promise of the internet