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Perusing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she requested pianos with the top removed to facilitate to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if any more recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also included some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been public about her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

In later 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 attempting to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, shows that that impulse extended back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she fuses these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an artist in full control. It’s electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from beneath 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.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences 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: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck describe 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, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal 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 corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"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 penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet