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Perusing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she requested pianos lacking the lid to allow her to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if additional recordings existed. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. And though she had long since retired years earlier, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

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 released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician trying to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, reveals that that impulse stretched back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an performer in total mastery. It’s electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Williams originally studied 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. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies 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 soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career arced towards 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 relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet