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Flipping through the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

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

Although the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she requested pianos with the top removed to allow her to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if additional recordings existed. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist trying to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, reveals that that impulse reached back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she fuses these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an artist in total mastery. This is thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck describe 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the more modern styles 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.

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 turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "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 faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the huge potential of the internet