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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 appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was best known for producing sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she requested pianos with the top removed to allow her to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if any more recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 artist seeking to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, shows that that impulse reached back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals 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."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she honed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an performer in total mastery. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. 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 commented: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field 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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to 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