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While browsing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she requested pianos with the top removed to make it easier to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if further recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works 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 difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

In later 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 pianist seeking to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, demonstrates that that impulse reached back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she merges these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an improviser in total mastery. That's exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

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

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck call 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, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about 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 quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – 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 truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field 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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 saw early on the huge potential of the internet