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Flipping through the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was best known for making vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she requested pianos with the top removed to facilitate to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if further recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two live, two studio creations. Although she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer 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 came out in conversation."

In later 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 seeking to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, demonstrates that that impulse stretched back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she merges these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she honed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an artist in complete command. This is thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently tinkered 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 shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "a top-tier 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path 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 veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts 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 essential beliefs," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed 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."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 huge potential of the internet