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While browsing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was most famous for making lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she requested pianos without the cover to allow her to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if any more recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician trying to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, reveals that that drive stretched back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student 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. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she blends these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an performer in full control. It’s exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She received her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he gave her 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 just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran'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 main method of landing performances – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. 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."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 saw early on the huge potential of the internet