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While browsing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was best known for creating sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she asked for pianos without the cover to allow her to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if any more recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two live, two studio creations. Even though she had long since retired some time before, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based 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 break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, reveals that that desire extended back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she merges these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an artist in complete command. This is exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

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

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later 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 trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts 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 disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena 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 moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet