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Flipping through the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was most famous for producing vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she asked for pianos with the top removed to allow her to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if any more recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Although she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. Her age 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 cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 musician seeking to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, shows that that desire stretched back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she blends these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an improviser in total mastery. It’s exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters 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. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to 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, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to study 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 encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal 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 corporate industry profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. 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 endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period 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 going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet