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Perusing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, 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. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she requested pianos without the cover to make it easier to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if any more recordings existed. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Although she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also included some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from 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."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist trying to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s 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))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she blends these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an performer in total mastery. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She received her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later describe Williams "among the finest 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. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to study 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 disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain 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."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active 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 great promise of the internet