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Flipping through the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was best known for making sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she required pianos without the cover to allow her to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if additional recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Even though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also included some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 attempting to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, shows that that desire extended back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she fuses these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she honed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an improviser in complete command. This is exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet