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Perusing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she required pianos with the top removed to allow her to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if additional recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. And though she had long since retired years earlier, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era 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 open regarding her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist trying to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, reveals that that impulse extended back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Soon after seeing 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 familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an artist in full control. This is thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, 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 just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, 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 faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling 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 recognized early the great promise of the internet