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Perusing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate 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 fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was most famous for creating sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to allow her to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if further recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two live, two studio creations. Even though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist attempting to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, shows that that impulse extended back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she fuses these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an artist in complete command. This is exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck describe 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, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way 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. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field 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."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 recognized early the huge potential of the internet