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Flipping through the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings were available. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. And though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also included some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been public about her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist attempting to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, shows that that drive reached back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she merges these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon 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 powered by the fizzy energy of an performer in total mastery. It’s thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She received her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies 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 rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit 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 bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet