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Perusing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making lively jazz in the direct lineage 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 with the top removed to allow her to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if any more recordings were available. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Even though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices all shone through 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 artist trying to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, shows that that impulse reached back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying 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. Soon after attending 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 connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she merges these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she developed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an performer in complete command. It’s thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later describe Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies 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 soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "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 suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint 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 going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet