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While browsing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was most famous for making lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she requested pianos with the top removed to make it easier to reach inside 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 states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if further recordings were available. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. And though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness 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) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist attempting to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, reveals that that desire extended back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Shortly after seeing 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 historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she merges these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in complete command. That's exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from below 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 explained.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck refer to Williams "one of the greatest 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, 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 chased 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

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the huge potential of the internet