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Perusing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was best known for making sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she requested pianos without the cover to facilitate to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if further recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Even though she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces 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 reveals. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 musician trying to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, reveals that that impulse extended back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Shortly after seeing 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 familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she blends these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she developed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an artist in full control. It’s electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She was given her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later refer to 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, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to study 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 disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met 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 meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails 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 fundamental principles," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, expressly 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 suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. After time 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 moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet