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Flipping through the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was best known for producing lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to get inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if any more recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. Although she had long since retired previously, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist trying to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, reveals that that desire reached back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she merges these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an improviser in total mastery. That's exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently tinkered 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 recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving 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 emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling 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 recognized early the huge potential of the internet