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Perusing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she required pianos with the top removed to facilitate to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if additional recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

In later 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 musician attempting to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, shows that that drive extended back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist 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, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, 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. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an improviser in total mastery. That's exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

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

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck describe Williams "a top-tier 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to learn about the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating 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 turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about 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

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant 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 understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet