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While browsing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was best known for producing sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to allow her to get inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if further recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two live, two studio creations. Even though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

In later 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 seeking to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, shows that that drive stretched back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations 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."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she merges these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an artist in complete command. It’s exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She received her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck 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, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving 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 turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, 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 drove her from her preferred musical arena 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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in 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