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While browsing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was most famous for making vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she asked for pianos with the top removed to allow her to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings were available. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Even though she had long since retired 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 worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 attempting to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, demonstrates that that desire reached back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Not long 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 link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she fuses these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an artist in complete command. That's exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She received her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: 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 stated.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck 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, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to learn about 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 quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

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, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet