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Perusing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "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."

As a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was most famous for producing lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she requested pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to get inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if additional recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist seeking to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct 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 massive roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she blends these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in total mastery. That's exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck describe Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, 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 soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving 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 became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet