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While browsing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was most famous for producing lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she asked for pianos with the top removed to make it easier to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist seeking to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, shows that that impulse reached back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she blends these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she developed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an artist in full control. This is exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She received her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside 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. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised 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

Brubeck would later describe 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, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about 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.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"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 essential beliefs," she penned in the album notes 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 trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena 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 evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet