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Perusing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was most famous for producing lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she requested pianos with the top removed to allow her to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if any more recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. And though she had long since retired years earlier, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued 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 public about her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

In later 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 attempting to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, shows that that impulse reached back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she blends these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an performer in complete command. It’s exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off 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 explained.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising 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 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to study 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 quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public 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 securing work – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails 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 stated in the album 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 individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field 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."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet