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Perusing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was most famous for creating lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she required pianos without the cover to make it easier to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if additional recordings were available. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following 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 pianist attempting to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, shows that that drive stretched back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an performer in full control. That's thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck refer to Williams "among the finest 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 characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys 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 rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet