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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was best known for making vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she required pianos with the top removed to allow her to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"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 sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

In later 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 seeking to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, demonstrates that that impulse stretched back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an artist in total mastery. That's electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She was given her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, 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. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to study 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 disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to 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 "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "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."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet