Flipping through the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."
As a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was best known for making lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.
If the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she asked for pianos with the top removed to make it easier to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her records.
"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if any more recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Although she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter recounts.
Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to put together 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 facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."
In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist trying to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, demonstrates that that drive reached back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.
Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."
Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she blends these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an improviser in full control. That's thrilling stuff.
Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.
Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.
Subsequently, Brubeck call 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disenchanted with the jazz world.
Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, 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 benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.
"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, 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 pushed her from her chosen artistic field 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."
Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 recognized early the great promise of the internet
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