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Flipping through the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she asked for pianos with the top removed to allow her to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if any more recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. Even though she had long since retired years earlier, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her hardships after 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 peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist attempting to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, reveals that that drive reached back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she merges these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an performer in total mastery. That's exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later describe 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 trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, 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 soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist'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 "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, 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 chased 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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active 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 saw early on the great promise of the internet