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Perusing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was best known for producing vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to allow her to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if any more recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Even though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 trying to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, demonstrates that that drive reached back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she fuses these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an performer in complete command. That's thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She received her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck describe 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 characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating 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 emerged as 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 artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her preferred musical arena 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period 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 recognized early the great promise of the internet