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While browsing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was most famous for making sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she required pianos without the cover to allow her to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if additional recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had long since retired some time before, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been public about her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through 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 musician trying to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, reveals that that impulse stretched back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in complete command. That's exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck 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, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to educate herself 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 rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged 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 "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. After time 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