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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was most famous for producing lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if any more recordings existed. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 seeking to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, shows that that drive extended back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she fuses these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an artist in full control. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later call 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys 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 rapidly felt disappointed 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 turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense 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. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 immense possibilities of the internet