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Flipping through the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making sparkling 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 lacking the lid to allow her to get inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if any more recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. And though she had long since retired some time before, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician seeking to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, shows that that desire reached back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. 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 surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she fuses these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an artist in full control. This is thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: 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 explained.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he brought 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 just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation 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 turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am continually 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 penned 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 chased her from her desired musical domain 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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 great promise of the internet