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While browsing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was best known for creating sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she required pianos with the top removed to allow her to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if additional recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. And though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through 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 pianist seeking to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, shows that that impulse stretched back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she fuses these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she honed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an artist in complete command. It’s exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck describe 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, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to study 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 disillusioned 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 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 profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 immense possibilities of the internet