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While browsing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she required pianos without the cover to facilitate to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if further recordings were available. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Although she had long since retired some time before, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter explains.

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. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 pianist attempting to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, demonstrates that that impulse reached back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she fuses these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an artist in full control. That's exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, 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, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the more modern styles 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.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as 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 main method of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am continually 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 album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 great promise of the internet