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Perusing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and released 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 unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for making sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she requested pianos without the cover to facilitate to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if further recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. Although she had long since retired previously, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 seeking to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, reveals that that impulse extended back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" 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 captivated by the power of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Shortly 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 relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she blends these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an artist in full control. It’s exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued 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. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented 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 gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, 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 desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 saw early on the huge potential of the internet