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Flipping through 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 little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was most famous for producing sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she required pianos lacking the lid to allow her to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if any more recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two live, two recorded in a studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been public about her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

In later 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 musician seeking to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, reveals that that impulse extended back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she blends these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an performer in total mastery. This is exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from under 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.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters 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. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

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 trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to educate herself 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.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling 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