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While browsing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she asked for pianos with the top removed to make it easier to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if further recordings existed. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through meditative practices all shone through 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 attempting to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, demonstrates that that desire extended back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars giving way to 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 partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she blends these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she developed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in complete command. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later call 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, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment 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. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet