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Perusing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she requested pianos with the top removed to make it easier to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if further recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist seeking to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, shows that that drive extended back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines spluttering into life. 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 worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an artist in total mastery. This is thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck refer to Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet