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While browsing the jazz section at a local record store 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 come off the tape," he notes. "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 particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was most famous for making sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she required pianos with the top removed to facilitate to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if any more recordings existed. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "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 diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist seeking to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, reveals that that drive extended back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she developed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an improviser in full control. This is exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Initially, Williams learned 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 chastised her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later describe Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way 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 encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails 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 fundamental principles," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena 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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the huge potential of the internet