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While browsing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As 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 out of character for Williams, who was most famous for making sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she requested pianos without the cover to make it easier to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if any more recordings existed. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician trying to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, demonstrates that that impulse stretched back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she fuses these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an performer in complete command. It’s exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Initially, Williams 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 altering a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "one of the greatest 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 signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to study 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 rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena 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."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet