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While browsing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet 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 notes. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she required pianos with the top removed to facilitate to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it 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 provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two studio creations. Although she had long since retired some time before, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 pianist trying to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, reveals that that impulse stretched back decades. In place of a consistent 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 sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she merges these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she developed in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an artist in complete command. It’s electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys 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 rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation 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 emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend 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 broad in scope, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed 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."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path 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 going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet