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Perusing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight 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 intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she requested pianos with the top removed to allow her to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to put together 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 seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist attempting to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, demonstrates that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she fuses these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an improviser in complete command. This is electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She was given her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Early on, Williams trained in 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 embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck refer to 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, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am continually 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 stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 recognized early the huge potential of the internet