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Flipping through the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "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 American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was most famous for making lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to allow her to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if further recordings were available. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. And though she had long since retired previously, she also included some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all came out 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 trying to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, demonstrates that that drive extended back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she fuses these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an improviser in complete command. That's exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She received her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from under 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 explained.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

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, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back 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. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena 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 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 saw early on the great promise of the internet