While browsing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."
As a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.
While the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she requested pianos with the top removed to facilitate 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 remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if further recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter explains.
Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."
In her subsequent 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 trying to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, reveals that that impulse stretched back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.
Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. 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 drawn to the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."
Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she fuses these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an performer in total mastery. It’s electrifying music.
Williams consistently explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from below 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.
Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.
In time, Brubeck describe 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, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, 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 quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.
After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.
"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, 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 drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."
The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet
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