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Perusing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she asked for pianos with the top removed to facilitate to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if further recordings existed. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Even though she had long since retired some time before, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

In later 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 artist seeking to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, reveals that that drive extended back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an improviser in complete command. It’s exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later describe Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, 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 quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired 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 low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena 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

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet