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Perusing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she requested pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to get inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if additional recordings existed. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had long since retired some time before, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been public about her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist seeking to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, reveals that that impulse reached back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after attending 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 familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she fuses these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an performer in full control. It’s electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," 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 reprimanded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. 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 dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period 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 going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet