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Perusing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was most famous for making vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she requested pianos without the cover to facilitate to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if further recordings were available. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. And though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also included some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In later 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 musician trying to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, shows that that desire reached back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she fuses these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in full control. This is exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed 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 wrote.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire 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: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned 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 similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to study 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 rapidly felt disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became 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 key way of securing work – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet