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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for making lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she asked for pianos with the top removed to facilitate to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if additional recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer 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) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist trying to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, demonstrates that that drive extended back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced 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 until this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she blends these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an performer in total mastery. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," 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 noted: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside 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. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized 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 describe Williams "a top-tier 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 trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to study 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.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal 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 profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet