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While browsing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she required pianos lacking the lid to allow her to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"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 sent back four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. And though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

In later 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 artist trying to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, reveals that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard 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 dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an performer in full control. This is exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out 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 similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys 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 disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating 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 became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet