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While browsing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to highlight 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. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was best known for making sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she requested pianos with the top removed to facilitate to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if any more recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist trying to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, demonstrates that that drive extended back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an artist in full control. That's thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached 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 explained.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered 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 just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to educate herself 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 rapidly felt disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became 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 main method of getting gigs – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet