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Perusing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was best known for creating sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she requested pianos lacking the lid to allow her to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if further recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Although she had long since retired previously, she also included some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 pianist seeking to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, reveals that that desire extended back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she blends these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an artist in total mastery. That's thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later describe Williams "among the finest 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to educate herself 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.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, 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 pushed her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 saw early on the great promise of the internet