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Perusing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was best known for creating lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she asked for pianos with the top removed to facilitate to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if any more recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Although she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been public about her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist trying to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, shows that that drive reached back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she fuses these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an artist in full control. This is thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

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

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later call Williams "among the finest 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 signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards 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 met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "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 faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 saw early on the great promise of the internet