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Perusing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she asked for pianos without the cover to make it easier to get inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if any more recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two live, two made in the studio. Even though she had long since retired years earlier, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

In later 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 pianist seeking to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, reveals that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard 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 dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she merges these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she developed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an performer in complete command. That's thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She received her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he introduced her to 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, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to study 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.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means 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 organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her preferred musical arena 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

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home 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 immense possibilities of the internet