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Flipping through the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was most famous for creating vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she required pianos without the cover to make it easier to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if additional recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Even though she had long since retired previously, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist seeking to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, reveals that that drive stretched back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" 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 force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she honed in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an artist in complete command. It’s thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "a top-tier 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about 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 soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"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 penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "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. After time in the bustling 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 recognized early the huge potential of the internet