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Perusing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was captivated 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 – for her concerts, she asked for pianos with the top removed to allow her to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if additional recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. And though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also included some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 attempting to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, demonstrates that that impulse extended back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an artist in total mastery. This is electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck 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, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to study 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 soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant 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 great promise of the internet