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While browsing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was most famous for making lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she requested pianos lacking the lid to allow her to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if further recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter explains.

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 released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician trying to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, shows that that impulse reached back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she fuses these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an artist in full control. This is electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned 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 equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself 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 rapidly felt disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender 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 inhumane bullshit she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet