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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was best known for creating vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if additional recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Even though she had long since retired some time before, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, shows that that drive extended back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she merges these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she honed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an performer in complete command. This is exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She received 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 wrote: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later describe Williams "one of the greatest 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired 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 "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "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 faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant 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 recognized early the great promise of the internet