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Flipping through the jazz records at a local record store 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 emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was most famous for creating sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she required pianos without the cover to facilitate to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if additional recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also included some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist seeking to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, reveals that that impulse reached back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she fuses these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an artist in total mastery. That's electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later call 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, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity 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 wide-ranging, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain 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

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint 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 moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the great promise of the internet