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Perusing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for making vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she requested pianos with the top removed to make it easier to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if additional recordings existed. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist attempting to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, demonstrates that that desire stretched back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she merges these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an artist in complete command. That's exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She received her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck 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, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts 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 quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, decidedly ideological 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 chosen artistic field 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

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet