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While browsing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she asked for pianos with the top removed to allow her to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if further recordings existed. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. But Williams died 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 hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

In later 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 pianist seeking to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, demonstrates that that drive stretched back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she honed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an performer in complete command. That's exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck refer to Williams "a top-tier 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disillusioned 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 became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability 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. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, 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 drove her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 recognized early the great promise of the internet