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While browsing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was best known for producing vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she required pianos with the top removed to facilitate to get inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if additional recordings were available. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. And though she had long since retired years earlier, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – 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, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties following 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 serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 musician seeking to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, shows that that drive stretched back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she fuses these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an artist in full control. It’s thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Williams originally learned 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 scolded her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck call 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, displays her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way 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 met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired 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 "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain 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

The artist's trajectory arced towards 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 moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet