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Perusing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she required pianos with the top removed to allow her to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if any more recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist seeking to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, shows that that impulse extended back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she fuses these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an artist in full control. This is exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

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

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck call Williams "among the finest 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 characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds 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.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena 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."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period 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 understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet