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While browsing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was most famous for making lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if any more recordings existed. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also included some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

In later 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 artist attempting to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, reveals that that desire extended back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist 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 intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she merges these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an artist in total mastery. That's thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She received her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from below 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.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, 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, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home 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