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While browsing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was best known for making lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she requested pianos without the cover to make it easier to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if additional recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist trying to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, shows that that drive reached back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker says 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 attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she fuses these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she honed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an artist in total mastery. That's exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded 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.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "one of the greatest 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about 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 quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into 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 primary means of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 recognized early the huge potential of the internet