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Perusing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for making sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she requested pianos with the top removed to allow her to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if any more recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Although she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been public about her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist trying to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, demonstrates that that impulse reached back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she merges these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an performer in total mastery. It’s exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She was given her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

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

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later describe Williams "a top-tier 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to learn about 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.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"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 wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her preferred musical arena 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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet