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Flipping through the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was best known for producing sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she required pianos with the top removed to allow her to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a aspect 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 see if any more recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Even though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also included some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice 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 artist attempting to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, demonstrates that that drive stretched back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she merges these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an performer in full control. That's thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Initially, Williams learned 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 scolded her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later call Williams "one of the greatest 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 characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating 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 strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a commercial business 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 fundamental principles," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint 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 huge potential of the internet