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Flipping through the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was best known for creating lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she requested pianos with the top removed to facilitate to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if additional recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Even though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also included some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist seeking to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, demonstrates that that impulse reached back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an performer in total mastery. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces 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 gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches 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.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field 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."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet