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While browsing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was best known for creating vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she requested pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if additional recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also included some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic 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 seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician trying to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, shows that that drive reached back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist 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 studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an performer in complete command. This is exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys 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 disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired 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 poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet