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Perusing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for making vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she required pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if any more recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. Although she had long since retired years earlier, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist seeking to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, shows that that impulse stretched back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she blends these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in complete command. This is electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She received her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck refer to 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, displays her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to learn about 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 rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed 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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the huge potential of the internet