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Flipping through the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she asked for pianos without the cover to allow her to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if further recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also included some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist attempting to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars collapsing into 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))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she blends these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an artist in total mastery. This is electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck describe 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, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 saw early on the huge potential of the internet