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Perusing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she requested pianos without the cover to make it easier to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if any more recordings existed. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Even though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated 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 seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist seeking to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, shows that that drive stretched back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Soon after witnessing 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 relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she fuses these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she honed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an improviser in complete command. That's electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She was given her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off 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.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, 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 trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, 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. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

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