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Perusing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was best known for creating lively 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 requested pianos without the cover to facilitate to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if any more recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been public about her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace 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 attempting to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, reveals that that drive reached back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she blends these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she developed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an artist in complete command. This is exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck refer to 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, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies 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 soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, decidedly ideological 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 cruel nonsense she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet