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Perusing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was best known for producing sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she requested pianos with the top removed to facilitate to get inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if any more recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Even though she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been public about 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 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 break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, reveals that that impulse extended back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked 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 was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she merges these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an artist in complete command. This is exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She was given her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later refer to 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 trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed 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 inhumane bullshit she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet