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Flipping through the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she required pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if additional recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been public about her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician attempting to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, shows that that desire extended back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing 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."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she blends these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an artist in total mastery. That's electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Initially, Williams learned 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 scolded her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck 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, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed 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

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 recognized early the huge potential of the internet