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Perusing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she asked for pianos without the cover to make it easier to get inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if further recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident 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 artist seeking to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, demonstrates that that drive stretched back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she blends these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an improviser in complete command. It’s electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later describe 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain 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

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 recognized early the huge potential of the internet