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Perusing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was best known for creating lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if further recordings existed. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. And though she had long since retired some time before, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist trying to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, shows that that desire stretched back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she merges these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an improviser in complete command. It’s exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck refer to Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts 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 rapidly felt disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met 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 "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender 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 endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet