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Flipping through the jazz section at a neighborhood shop 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 fallen off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was best known for creating lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she asked for pianos with the top removed to make it easier to reach inside and strum 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. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if any more recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also included some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

In later 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 artist attempting to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, reveals that that desire extended back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she fuses these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an improviser in complete command. That's electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys 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 soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, 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 drove her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet