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Flipping through the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was best known 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 – at her live shows, she requested pianos with the top removed to allow her to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if additional recordings were available. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Although she had long since retired years earlier, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been public about her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 trying to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, reveals that that impulse reached back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "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."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she merges these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an performer in full control. That's thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Initially, Williams trained in 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 chastised her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later call Williams "among the finest 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 trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, 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 disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. 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 faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career evolved into 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 relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the huge potential of the internet