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While browsing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she requested pianos without the cover to facilitate to get inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if any more recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. And though she had long since retired some time before, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

In later 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 seeking to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, demonstrates that that impulse reached back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she fuses these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she developed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an artist in total mastery. That's electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to study the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way 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 encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "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 endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet