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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 musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was best known for producing lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she requested pianos lacking the lid to allow her to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if additional recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. And though she had long since retired some time before, she also included some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 musician seeking to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, shows that that drive reached back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker states 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 studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she fuses these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an artist in full control. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from under 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 stated.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to educate herself 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 disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality 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 liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "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 endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint 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 relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet