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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she asked for pianos with the top removed to make it easier to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if further recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Although she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also included some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through meditative practices all came out 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 seeking to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, reveals that that drive extended back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she fuses these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she developed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an performer in complete command. That's electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he brought her 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, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to educate herself 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.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal 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 artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet