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Perusing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across 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 home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she required pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that rarely made it on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident 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 artist attempting to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, reveals that that drive reached back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist 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 otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she merges these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an improviser in full control. It’s electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to study 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 soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit 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 active Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 great promise of the internet