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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from 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 American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was most famous for creating sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she required pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if additional recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist attempting to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, shows that that desire extended back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she merges these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an performer in complete command. This is electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Early on, Williams learned 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 scolded her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to learn about 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 rapidly felt disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain 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."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in 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