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Flipping through the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was most famous for making vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she requested pianos with the top removed to make it easier to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if any more recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two live, two made in the studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through 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 musician seeking to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, shows that that drive stretched back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced 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 otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she merges these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an improviser in full control. That's exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences 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. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later describe Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed 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

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in 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