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While browsing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was most famous for producing vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she asked for pianos with the top removed to facilitate to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if additional recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had long since retired years earlier, she also included some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

In later 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 artist trying to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, shows that that impulse stretched back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she blends these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an artist in complete command. It’s thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

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, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," 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 financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet