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Perusing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if any more recordings existed. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through meditative practices all shone through 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 musician trying to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, reveals that that impulse reached back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she blends these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an improviser in full control. That's electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from beneath 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 explained.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "among the finest 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles 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. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "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 arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet