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While browsing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, 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 avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was best known for producing lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she requested pianos without the cover to make it easier to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if further recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Although she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist trying to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, shows that that desire stretched back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she blends these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon 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 psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an performer in full control. It’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 obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences 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. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck describe 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, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the great promise of the internet