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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she required pianos without the cover to facilitate to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if any more recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two studio creations. And though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties after 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 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 artist trying to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, reveals that that impulse reached back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power 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 abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

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 masterfully she merges these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an performer in full control. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She received her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Early on, Williams studied 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 chastised 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.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later call Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered 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 "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, expressly 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 terrible treatment she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet