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Flipping through the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she asked for pianos with the top removed to facilitate to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if any more recordings existed. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Even though she had long since retired years earlier, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been public about her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

In later 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 break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, shows that that drive stretched back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after witnessing 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 connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she merges these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she developed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an performer in total mastery. This is electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later describe Williams "among the finest 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 trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to learn about 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 disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran'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 "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet