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Perusing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was best known for creating lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she asked for pianos with the top removed to allow her to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that rarely made it on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if additional recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two live, two studio creations. And though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician trying to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, shows that that impulse reached back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an artist in complete command. It’s exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Williams originally learned 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 chastised her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck call 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 signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet