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Perusing the jazz section 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 fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on 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 best known for producing sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she asked for pianos with the top removed to allow her to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if any more recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. And though she had long since retired some time before, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician attempting to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, demonstrates that that desire extended back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she blends these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an performer in total mastery. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

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

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later refer to 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, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist'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 "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field 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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory moved toward 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 saw early on the great promise of the internet