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While browsing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was most famous for producing vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she required pianos with the top removed to facilitate to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if any more recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Although she had long since retired previously, she also included some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 artist seeking to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, demonstrates that that drive extended back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist 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 being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Soon 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 relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she fuses these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an performer in full control. This is electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Early on, Williams 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 reprimanded her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later refer to 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, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to study 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 rapidly felt disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "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 suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active 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 saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet