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Perusing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she asked for pianos with the top removed to make it easier to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if further recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 musician trying to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, shows that that desire stretched back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding 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 says. "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 historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she honed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in complete command. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She was given her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck call Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to learn about 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 quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"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 essential beliefs," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena 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."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet