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Perusing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was best known for making lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she requested pianos without the cover to facilitate to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if any more recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 pianist trying to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, demonstrates that that desire extended back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she blends these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an improviser in full control. It’s electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She received her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck call 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, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself 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 quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts 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 essential beliefs," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain 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

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