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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was best known for making lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if additional recordings were available. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Although she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also included some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been public about her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 trying to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, demonstrates that that impulse reached back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she merges these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an performer in full control. It’s electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She received her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck 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 trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies 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 disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans 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 cruel nonsense she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 immense possibilities of the internet