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Flipping through the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was best known for creating sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she asked for pianos without the cover to allow her to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if further recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Even though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist attempting to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, demonstrates that that impulse extended back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship 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 modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she blends these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an artist in full control. That's exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. However, he detected 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 call 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, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to study 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 quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated 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 trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

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, moving to Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet