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While browsing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, 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 captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she requested pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if additional recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been public about her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused 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 transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, reveals that that drive reached back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she merges these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an performer in complete command. This is thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed 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 explained.

Early on, Williams trained in 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 scolded her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, 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 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 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 getting gigs – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "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 endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet