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While browsing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was most famous for making lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she required pianos with the top removed to facilitate to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if additional recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Although she had long since retired some time before, she also included some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through 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 artist seeking to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, shows that that impulse reached back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations 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."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she merges these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an artist in complete command. This is electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to 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, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself 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 met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "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 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 vibrant 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 saw early on the huge potential of the internet