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Perusing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was most famous for producing sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she required pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if additional recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been public about her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits 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 artist trying to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, demonstrates that that desire stretched back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she merges these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she developed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an improviser in total mastery. That's thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She received her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck call Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran'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 "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have endured 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 vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through 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