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Flipping through the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was most famous for creating vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she required pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if any more recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. And though she had long since retired some time before, she also included some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her struggles after 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 having a spiritual practice all shone through 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 attempting to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, reveals that that drive reached back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she blends these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an performer in total mastery. This is exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck call 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, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys 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 quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain 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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in 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