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Flipping through 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 classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, 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 albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if further recordings were available. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Even though she had long since retired previously, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been public about her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 attempting to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, demonstrates that that desire stretched back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer 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 intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after attending 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 link 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 radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an artist in full control. That's electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Williams originally studied 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 scolded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later describe 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. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired 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 low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain 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

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period 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 saw early on the great promise of the internet