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Perusing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate 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 unusual from Williams, who was most famous for producing sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if further recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe 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) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist attempting to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, shows that that drive reached back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in full control. This is electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck call 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, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to study 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 rapidly felt disillusioned 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 outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails 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 essential beliefs," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field 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 evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period 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 huge potential of the internet