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While browsing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she asked for pianos without the cover to allow her to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered 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, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. 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 came out 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 tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, demonstrates that that impulse stretched back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard 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 witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she blends these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an improviser in complete command. This is thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck 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, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove 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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the great promise of the internet