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While browsing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she asked for pianos with the top removed to make it easier to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if any more recordings existed. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had long since retired some time before, she also included some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

In later 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 attempting to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, reveals that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Shortly after witnessing 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 connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she blends these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an performer in total mastery. This is electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from below 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 presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck refer to Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, 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 repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet