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While browsing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by 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 making sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she required pianos without the cover to facilitate to get inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if further recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two live, two made in the studio. Although she had long since retired some time before, she also included some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been public about her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "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 curiously transformed piano resonances, demonstrates that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively 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 catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an performer in full control. It’s thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "a top-tier 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 trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to learn about the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards 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 was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet