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Perusing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was most famous for producing sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she asked for pianos without the cover to make it easier to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if further recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also shared some newer material. "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 compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been public about her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident 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 artist trying to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, shows that that desire stretched back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker states 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 drawn to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she merges these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she developed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an improviser in complete command. This is electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck call 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, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to study 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 quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 immense possibilities of the internet