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Perusing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was most famous for making lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she requested pianos lacking the lid to allow her to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if further recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician seeking to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, shows that that impulse extended back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker states 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 attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in full control. That's thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She received her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck 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, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to educate herself 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 quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open 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 getting gigs – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period 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 going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet