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Perusing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to allow her to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that rarely made it on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if any more recordings were available. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Even though she had long since retired years earlier, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 musician trying to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, shows that that drive extended back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an performer in full control. It’s thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from below 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 stated.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later call Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to learn about the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory arced towards 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 huge potential of the internet