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Perusing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was most famous for creating sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she requested pianos without the cover to facilitate to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if any more recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 musician attempting to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, reveals that that desire extended back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she merges these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an artist in total mastery. It’s exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation 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 outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home 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