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While browsing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she requested pianos with the top removed to make it easier to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if any more recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 pianist trying to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, shows that that drive extended back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an improviser in total mastery. It’s electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She received her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "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 explained.

Williams originally learned 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 chastised her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later call Williams "one of the greatest 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to learn about 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.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet