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While browsing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

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

Although the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she requested pianos with the top removed to allow her to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if further recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had long since retired years earlier, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning 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 peace she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, demonstrates that that desire extended back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist 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 power of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she blends these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in complete command. It’s exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon 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: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays 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.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a corporate industry 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 wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet