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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she required pianos with the top removed to allow her to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if any more recordings were available. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Although she had long since retired some time before, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been public about her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe 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 musician attempting to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, shows that that desire extended back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated 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 knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she merges these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an improviser in complete command. That's exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She received her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

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

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later call Williams "one of the greatest 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 trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies 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 soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote 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 rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant 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 understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet