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Perusing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was best known for producing lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to allow her to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if further recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two live, two made in the studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works 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 open regarding her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through 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 seeking to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, reveals that that impulse reached back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she blends these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an artist in complete command. It’s exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She received her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Williams originally 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 reprimanded her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later call 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches 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 was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet