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While browsing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was most famous for producing lively 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 required pianos with the top removed to allow her to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if any more recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. And though she had long since retired some time before, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been public about her difficulties after 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 peace she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician seeking to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, shows that that desire stretched back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods 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 stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an artist in full control. This is electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached 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 trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

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, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself 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 disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet