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Perusing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector 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 photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating vibrant jazz in the direct lineage 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 make it easier to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if additional recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two live, two studio creations. Even though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been public about her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist trying to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, demonstrates that that drive stretched back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she merges these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an improviser in full control. This is electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck call 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys 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 quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating 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 forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in 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