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Flipping through the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was most famous for producing sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she requested pianos without the cover to make it easier to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if any more recordings existed. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 artist seeking to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, shows that that drive reached back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she honed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an artist in total mastery. It’s exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She received her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from under 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.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later call 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 signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to educate herself 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 soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – 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 failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove 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."

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 relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the huge potential of the internet