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Flipping through the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was most famous for producing lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she asked for pianos without the cover to allow her to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if any more recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist seeking to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, shows that that desire reached back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. 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 drawn to the force of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike 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. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she fuses these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an improviser in full control. It’s thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She was given her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising 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

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disappointed 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 strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly 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 album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet