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While browsing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was best known for creating sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she requested pianos lacking the lid to allow her to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if further recordings existed. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Even though she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 trying to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, shows that that desire stretched back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she fuses these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an artist in total mastery. This is exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She was given her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from under 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.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later describe 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, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to educate herself 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 quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – 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 reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the album notes 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 trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet