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Perusing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she requested pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if additional recordings were available. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Even though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 artist seeking to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, reveals that that impulse reached back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she fuses these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an performer in total mastery. That's thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently 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 "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

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, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles 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. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field 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."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 immense possibilities of the internet