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Flipping through the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was most famous for creating vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she asked for pianos without the cover to facilitate to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if any more recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties following 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 calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 attempting to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, shows that that impulse stretched back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems 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 altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she blends these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an artist in complete command. That's thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from under 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.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "among the finest 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet