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While browsing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene post 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 direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she required pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if any more recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Although she had long since retired years earlier, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: 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. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist trying to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. 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 intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Shortly 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 relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she merges these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an artist in total mastery. This is exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She received her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from below 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 wrote.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

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, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to study 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 disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling 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