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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was most famous for producing sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a facet that rarely made it on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if additional recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices all shone through 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 convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, shows that that drive extended back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until 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 link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she fuses these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an performer in full control. This is exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She received her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

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

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. 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 extensive studies to educate herself 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 disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain 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

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 recognized early the great promise of the internet