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Flipping through the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was best known for making vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to allow her to access the interior 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 states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if additional recordings were available. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. And though she had long since retired previously, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been public about her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician attempting to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, demonstrates that that drive reached back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. 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 captivated by the force of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she blends these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she developed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an improviser in total mastery. This is thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," 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 wrote: Williams detached 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.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself 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 rapidly felt disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal 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 landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain 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 arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 huge potential of the internet