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Perusing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was best known for making sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she required pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if any more recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Even though she had long since retired previously, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," 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 published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist seeking to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, demonstrates that that drive stretched back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an performer in complete command. This is thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She was given her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon 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 figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "among the finest 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up 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 poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field 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

Williams’ career arced towards 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 relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet