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While browsing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was best known for making lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she required pianos without the cover to allow her to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also included some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works 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 says. Williams had been public about her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician trying to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, demonstrates that that drive extended back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker expresses 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 attracted to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she fuses these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she developed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an performer in total mastery. That's electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She received her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "one of the greatest 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 signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies 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 quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – 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 reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet