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Flipping through the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for making sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she requested pianos without the cover to facilitate to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also included some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist attempting to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, shows that that drive extended back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she merges these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she developed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an artist in total mastery. It’s electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising 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

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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to 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 low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, openly 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 preferred musical arena 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 evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet