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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was most famous for making vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she requested pianos without the cover to facilitate to get inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if any more recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist seeking to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, reveals that that impulse reached back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she merges these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she honed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an improviser in total mastery. It’s electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck call Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys 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 soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint 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 relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet