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Perusing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was best known for producing sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to allow her to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if additional recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been public about her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through 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 pianist trying to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, demonstrates that that desire reached back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she blends these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an artist in full control. This is electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She received her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire 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 learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck call 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, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving 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 strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet