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While browsing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was most famous for making lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she required pianos without the cover to make it easier to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if further recordings existed. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also included some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties after 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 her spiritual pursuits all shone through 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 escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, demonstrates that that drive stretched back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she developed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an performer in complete command. That's exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from below 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.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches 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.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for 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, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "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 suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet