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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was most famous for making vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she required pianos with the top removed to allow her to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if any more recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Even though she had long since retired some time before, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices all were evident 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 musician trying to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, shows that that impulse reached back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing 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

These modified tones have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she fuses these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an performer in full control. It’s electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Early on, Williams studied 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 chastised her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later describe Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. 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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 great promise of the internet