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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was most famous for producing vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she required pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if additional recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Although she had long since retired years earlier, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician trying to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, demonstrates that that drive reached back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she honed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in complete command. That's exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She received her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Early on, Williams trained in 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. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to 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, displays her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet