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Perusing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she required pianos lacking the lid to allow her to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if any more recordings existed. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had long since retired years earlier, she also included some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance 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) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician trying to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an artist in total mastery. It’s exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Williams originally 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: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself 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 soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet