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Flipping through the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "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 keenly focused on the American musical avant garde post 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 conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she requested pianos with the top removed to facilitate to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if additional recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Even though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered 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, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 pianist trying to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, shows that that drive stretched back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s 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 drawn to the power of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she fuses these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an artist in total mastery. It’s thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She was given her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck 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, shows her deep absorption in 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 tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into 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 getting gigs – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling 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 saw early on the great promise of the internet