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Flipping through the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she asked for pianos with the top removed to make it easier to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if additional recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been public about her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician seeking to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, shows that that drive stretched back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" 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 captivated by the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she merges these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an improviser in full control. That's thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off 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 wrote.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later describe Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts 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 was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work 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 essential beliefs," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet