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Perusing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she required pianos without the cover to allow her to get inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if further recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also included some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

In later 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 trying to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, shows that that drive stretched back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she merges these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an artist in full control. That's electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised 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.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck call Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, 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 disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"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 essential beliefs," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her preferred musical arena 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

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet