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Flipping through the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was best known for making sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she requested 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 comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if additional recordings existed. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

In later 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 escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, demonstrates that that impulse extended back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "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

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she blends these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an artist in total mastery. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She was given her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck describe Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity 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 eclectic, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena 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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant 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 recognized early the huge potential of the internet