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Perusing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was most famous for producing sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she asked for pianos with the top removed to allow her to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if any more recordings were available. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. And though she had long since retired some time before, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been public about her hardships 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 calmness she found through meditative practices 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 pianist trying to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, demonstrates that that drive extended back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist 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))), 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 otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she fuses these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an performer in complete command. This is electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She was given her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later describe Williams "among the finest 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "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 endured 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 vibrant 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 huge potential of the internet