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Flipping through the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was best known for making lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she required pianos without the cover to allow her to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if further recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

In later 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 musician seeking to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, reveals that that drive reached back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she merges these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she honed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an artist in full control. That's exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She received her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from under 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 explained.

Williams originally trained in 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 scolded 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.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, 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 trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back 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 encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote 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 seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena 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

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet