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While browsing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if additional recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also included some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist attempting to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, reveals that that impulse reached back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she fuses these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an artist in total mastery. This is electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She was given her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to educate herself 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 disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. After time 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 moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet