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Perusing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she asked for pianos without the cover to facilitate to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if further recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. And though she had long since retired some time before, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released 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 states. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist seeking to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, demonstrates that that impulse stretched back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she merges these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an improviser in complete command. This is thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She was given her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued 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. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later describe 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, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to learn about 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 quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in 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