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Perusing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was most famous for creating lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she requested pianos without the cover to facilitate to get inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if additional recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. And though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 pianist seeking to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, reveals that that drive reached back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she merges these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she developed in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an performer in total mastery. This is electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon 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 introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later call 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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