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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she asked for pianos with the top removed to make it easier to get inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if any more recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had long since retired some time before, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble 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 dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist trying to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, reveals that that drive extended back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an artist in complete command. It’s electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off 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 explained.

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

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck describe 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 characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to study 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 disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving 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 forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant 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 immense possibilities of the internet