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Flipping through the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she asked for pianos with the top removed to allow her to get inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if further recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. Although she had long since retired years earlier, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been public about her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace 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) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist seeking to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, shows that that desire stretched back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she merges these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an artist in total mastery. That's electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She received her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck call Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts 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 quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – 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 remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet