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Flipping through the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was best known for producing sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if additional recordings were available. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding 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 her spiritual pursuits all were evident 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 artist attempting to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, demonstrates that that desire extended back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals 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 historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she fuses these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an performer in full control. It’s thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering 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.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to 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 trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate 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, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet