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While browsing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was most famous for producing vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she requested pianos lacking the lid to allow her to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if further recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through 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 pianist attempting to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, demonstrates that that impulse reached back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike 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. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she blends these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an performer in total mastery. This is exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She was given her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Williams originally learned 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 altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path 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 was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender 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

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the great promise of the internet