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Flipping through the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she requested pianos with the top removed to facilitate to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if additional recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

In later 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 escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, shows that that drive extended back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "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 technical precursors: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she merges these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an artist in full control. This is thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from below 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.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck describe Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into 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 primary means of landing performances – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active 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 understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet