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Flipping through the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was most famous for creating vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she requested pianos with the top removed to facilitate to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if additional recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Although she had long since retired some time before, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been public about her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist attempting to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, reveals that that drive extended back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses 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 attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing 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."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she honed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an artist in total mastery. This is electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She received her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck refer to Williams "a top-tier 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 trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating 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 strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly 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 penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling 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 recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet