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Perusing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was best known for making lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she requested pianos with the top removed to make it easier to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if additional recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. And though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been public about her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 musician attempting to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, reveals that that impulse extended back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

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 being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but was largely unaware 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. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she merges these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an performer in full control. That's electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

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

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later call Williams "among the finest 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. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to study 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 rapidly felt disillusioned 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 strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend 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 eclectic, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove 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."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet