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While browsing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she requested pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if any more recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two live, two made in the studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

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 released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist attempting to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, reveals that that desire extended back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist 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 drawn to the force of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she fuses these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she developed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an performer in full control. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys 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 soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as 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 key way of landing performances – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet