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Flipping through the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette 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 issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she requested pianos with the top removed to make it easier to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if further recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. And though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 artist trying to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, reveals that that impulse extended back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an improviser in full control. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She was given her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures 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. But he saw her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, 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 disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating 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 strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, 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 benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint 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 immense possibilities of the internet