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Perusing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was most famous for producing sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she requested pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if any more recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 artist trying to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, demonstrates that that desire stretched back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered 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 dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she merges these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an improviser in total mastery. That's thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck call Williams "a top-tier 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about 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 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 senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, 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 riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet