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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

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

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she asked for pianos with the top removed to make it easier to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if additional recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Although she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces 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 states. 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 peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician seeking to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, shows that that drive reached back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she blends these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an improviser in complete command. This is electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later call Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about 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 soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became 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 landing performances – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet