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Perusing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was most famous for producing lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she asked for pianos with the top removed to allow her to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if additional recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all came out 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 musician seeking to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, shows that that desire reached back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an performer in complete command. That's exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from under 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.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to 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, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to study 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 quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet