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Flipping through 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 ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was most famous for making sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she requested pianos with the top removed to make it easier to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if additional recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also included some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused 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 escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, shows that that drive reached back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she merges these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an improviser in full control. It’s thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later refer to 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, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys 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. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "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 suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the huge potential of the internet