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While browsing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was best known for creating vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she required pianos without the cover to allow her to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if further recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. And though she had long since retired some time before, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices all came out 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 pianist attempting to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, shows that that impulse reached back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an improviser in total mastery. That's electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. 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 dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 great promise of the internet