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While browsing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was best known for creating lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she requested pianos without the cover to make it easier to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if further recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also included some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice 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 artist attempting to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, shows that that drive reached back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer 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 intensity of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before 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 familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an performer in total mastery. That's exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later call Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. 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 contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed 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 cruel nonsense she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path 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, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the great promise of the internet