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While browsing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was most famous for producing vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she required pianos without the cover to make it easier to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if any more recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 pianist attempting to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, demonstrates that that impulse extended back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker expresses 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 studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she merges these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she honed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an performer in total mastery. That's electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing 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.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back 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 was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," 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. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet