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Perusing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was most famous for producing lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she required pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to get inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if further recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Even though she had long since retired years earlier, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," says Potter.

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 seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been public about her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices all came out 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 artist attempting to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, shows that that drive extended back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she merges these new sounds 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, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an artist in complete command. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off 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.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased 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

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active 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 recognized early the huge potential of the internet