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Flipping through the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she asked for pianos with the top removed to make it easier to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if further recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two live, two studio creations. Even though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist trying to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, shows that that drive extended back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she blends these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an performer in complete command. That's electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Williams originally learned 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 scolded her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck describe Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts 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 soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation 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 turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint 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 saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet