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Perusing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was most famous for making vibrant 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 asked for pianos without the cover to facilitate to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if further recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 artist attempting to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, shows that that impulse reached back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student 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. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she merges these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an artist in complete command. This is thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: 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.

Early on, Williams learned 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 scolded her for altering 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.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later describe Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged 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 poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet