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While browsing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop 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 detached from the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was best known for producing sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she asked for pianos with the top removed to facilitate to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings were available. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two live, two made in the studio. And though she had long since retired years earlier, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused 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 break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, reveals that that desire extended back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist 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 studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she blends these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an artist in complete command. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She was given her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon 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 following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck call 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself 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 disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "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 suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling 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 understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet