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While browsing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was best known for creating vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if further recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Even though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been public about her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician trying to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she merges these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in full control. This is thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

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

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck call 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 signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about 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 cruel nonsense she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 recognized early the huge potential of the internet