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While browsing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

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

If the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she asked for pianos without the cover to allow her to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if any more recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Although she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also included some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices 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 pianist seeking to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, shows that that desire stretched back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn 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 says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she merges these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an artist in total mastery. That's electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Williams originally studied 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 reprimanded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to 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, displays her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove 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 moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant 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