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Perusing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed 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 emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she required pianos with the top removed to facilitate to get inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if any more recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been public about her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all came out 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 tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, shows that that drive extended back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to 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. The notable aspect is how masterfully she fuses these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an performer in full control. This is electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: 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 trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later describe Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards 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 was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet