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Perusing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized 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 – for her concerts, she required pianos without the cover to facilitate to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that rarely made it on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if any more recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two studio creations. And though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been public about her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician attempting to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, demonstrates that that impulse reached back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she fuses these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she honed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an artist in total mastery. That's thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "one of the greatest 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches 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.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged 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 low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "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 suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the huge potential of the internet