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Perusing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she requested pianos with the top removed to make it easier to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if any more recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. And though she had long since retired previously, she also included some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence 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) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician seeking to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, demonstrates that that impulse extended back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she fuses these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an performer in total mastery. This is exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside 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 presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later describe Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. 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 study the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have endured 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 active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet