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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for making sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she requested pianos with the top removed to facilitate to get inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits 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 musician seeking to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, demonstrates that that drive extended back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she blends these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an performer in complete command. It’s exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set 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. Early encounters 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. But he saw her potential: the following week, he brought her 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 similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 immense possibilities of the internet