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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was best known for making vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she required pianos with the top removed to allow her to get inside and play the strings directly – 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 additional recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Although she had long since retired years earlier, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to put together 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 vocal concerning her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence 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) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician seeking to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, reveals that that impulse reached back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an improviser in complete command. This is exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She was given her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "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 next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

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 chastised her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving 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 poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "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

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet