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Flipping through the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for making sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she requested pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if additional recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also included some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 pianist trying to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, reveals that that drive extended back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she blends these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an improviser in complete command. This is exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized 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 refer to 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, shows 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 soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating 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 poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "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 faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career arced towards 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 going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the huge potential of the internet