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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for making vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she asked for pianos without the cover to allow her to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if additional recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Although she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also included some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist attempting to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she blends these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an performer in complete command. That's thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later call Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself 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 quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open 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 landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet