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While browsing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was best known for producing lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she requested pianos without the cover to allow her to get inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if any more recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through meditative practices 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 artist trying to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she blends these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an improviser in full control. This is electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from beneath 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.

Initially, Williams learned 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 embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck describe 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, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path 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 encountered 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 meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in 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