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Flipping through the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was most famous for making vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she required pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if any more recordings were available. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also included some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," says Potter.

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. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 attempting to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, demonstrates that that impulse stretched back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques 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 developed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an performer in total mastery. That's electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She received her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: 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. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "one of the greatest 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal 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 continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed 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 arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 recognized early the huge potential of the internet