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While browsing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was most famous for producing lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she required pianos with the top removed to make it easier to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if further recordings existed. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist trying to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, shows that that desire reached back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" 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 captivated by the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she merges these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an performer in complete command. It’s thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up 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 "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain 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."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the great promise of the internet