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Perusing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was most famous for making sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she requested pianos with the top removed to facilitate to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if any more recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Even though she had long since retired some time before, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist seeking to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, demonstrates that that desire stretched back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she fuses these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an improviser in full control. That's exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She received her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck refer to 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, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about 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 soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to 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 "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the sleeve text 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 infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field 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

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, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet