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Perusing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was most famous for making sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she requested pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if any more recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had long since retired previously, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist trying to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, demonstrates that that impulse reached back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she blends these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an performer in full control. It’s electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to 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, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to educate herself 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 rapidly felt disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period 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 huge potential of the internet