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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 American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was most famous for creating vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she asked for pianos with the top removed to facilitate to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if further recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 artist attempting to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician 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 power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she blends these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in full control. This is electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Early on, 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 scolded her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck call Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path 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 senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, openly 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 chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet