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Perusing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she asked for pianos with the top removed to allow her to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if additional recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices all were evident 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 attempting to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, demonstrates that that impulse reached back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct 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 monumental roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she blends these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an artist in complete command. That's exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from below 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 explained.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck refer to Williams "among the finest 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena 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."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in 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