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While browsing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she requested pianos lacking the lid to allow her to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if further recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been public about her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits 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 artist seeking to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, shows that that drive stretched back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an performer in full control. It’s exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to 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 traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later describe Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever 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 disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her preferred musical arena 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 arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet