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Perusing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to allow her to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if any more recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two live, two studio creations. Although she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through meditative practices all shone through 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 artist seeking to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, shows that that drive stretched back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician 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 captivated by the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she blends these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an artist in full control. That's electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She received her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, 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 placed it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters 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. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later describe 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to educate herself 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 disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet