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Perusing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was best known for creating lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she requested pianos without the cover to make it easier to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if any more recordings existed. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 trying to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, shows that that desire extended back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she fuses these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an improviser in total mastery. That's electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck describe Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. 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 extensive studies to learn about the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards 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 met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up 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 "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 saw early on the great promise of the internet