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Flipping through the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she requested pianos with the top removed to allow her to get inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if any more recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two studio creations. And though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her hardships 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 peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident 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 musician trying to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, shows that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she merges these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an performer in total mastery. This is electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She received her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

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, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles 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.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet