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Perusing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she asked for pianos with the top removed to allow her to get inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if further recordings existed. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also included some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices all were evident 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 pianist attempting to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, shows that that desire extended back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she fuses these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an improviser in total mastery. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "one of the greatest 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician'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 key way of landing performances – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "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 suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet