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Flipping through the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was most famous for making lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she asked for pianos without the cover to allow her to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if any more recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Even though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been public about her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits 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 trying to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, reveals that that impulse extended back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "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

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she blends these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an improviser in total mastery. That's exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

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. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck call Williams "among the finest 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about 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 disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating 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 turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

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