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While browsing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was most famous for producing lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she requested pianos without the cover to allow her to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if any more recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had long since retired previously, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist seeking to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist 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))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an artist in full control. That's exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

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

Frustration with the Scene

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, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself 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 rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 great promise of the internet