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Flipping through the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was most famous for producing vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she requested pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to get inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings were available. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. Although she had long since retired some time before, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician seeking to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, shows that that desire reached back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she blends these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an performer in complete command. That's exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She received her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Williams originally trained in 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 chastised her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later describe 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, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to learn about 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 rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the sleeve text 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 trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased 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."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet