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While browsing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was best known for creating lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she asked for pianos without the cover to make it easier to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if additional recordings were available. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. And though she had long since retired years earlier, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 attempting to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, shows that that impulse stretched back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer 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 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 "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she blends these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an artist in complete command. That's thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She received her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "one of the greatest 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 characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to learn about 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 soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased 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."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in 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