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Flipping through the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she requested pianos without the cover to allow her to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if additional recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through 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 pianist trying to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, demonstrates that that drive stretched back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker says 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 studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an improviser in complete command. That's exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Williams originally studied 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 chastised her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later refer to 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, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet