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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was most famous for making sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she required pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if further recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident 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 attempting to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, demonstrates that that desire extended back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she blends these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an performer in full control. That's electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She received her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck describe Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet