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While browsing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, 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 following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was most famous for making vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she required pianos without the cover to make it easier to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a aspect 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 inquire if any more recordings existed. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also included some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, reveals that that drive reached back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker says 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 studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Shortly after attending 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 relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she merges these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she developed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an performer in complete command. That's electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She was given her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Initially, Williams learned 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 reprimanded her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to learn about the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path 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 met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain 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."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through 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