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Perusing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she asked for pianos without the cover to facilitate to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a facet that rarely made it 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 responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Although she had long since retired some time before, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 trying to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, reveals that that impulse extended back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she fuses these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an artist in total mastery. This is electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

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 dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving 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 emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove 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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active 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 huge potential of the internet