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Perusing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating sparkling 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 asked for pianos with the top removed to allow her to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that rarely made it on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings were available. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two live, two studio creations. And though she had long since retired years earlier, she also included some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. 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. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident 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 pianist seeking to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, shows that that desire extended back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician 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 attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before 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

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she merges these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an performer in full control. This is electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to learn about 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 soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote 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 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 inhumane bullshit she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet