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While browsing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was most famous for producing lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she asked for pianos with the top removed to facilitate to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if any more recordings existed. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Although she had long since retired years earlier, she also included some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, reveals that that impulse stretched back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an performer in full control. It’s exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took 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 introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck describe 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, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense 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. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet