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While browsing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she asked for pianos without the cover to make it easier to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if additional recordings were available. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been public about her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance 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) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician trying to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, reveals that that impulse extended back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and tiny engines sparking to 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 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 otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Not long 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 relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in full control. That's thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back 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 turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she stated 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 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 endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling 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 saw early on the great promise of the internet