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Flipping through the jazz section at a neighborhood shop 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 home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

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

If the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she required pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if additional recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Although she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also included some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued 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 says. Williams had been public about her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician seeking to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she fuses these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she developed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an improviser in total mastery. This is thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"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 core values," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the great promise of the internet