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While browsing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was most famous for making sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she requested pianos without the cover to facilitate to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if additional recordings were available. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. And though she had long since retired some time before, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through meditative practices 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 musician attempting to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, shows that that impulse reached back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she fuses these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in total mastery. It’s exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from beneath 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 stated.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep absorption in 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 quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. 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 endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet