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Perusing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to allow her to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings existed. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist seeking to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, demonstrates that that desire extended back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she fuses these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in total mastery. That's thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

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

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "among the finest 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way 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 was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field 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."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the great promise of the internet