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While browsing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was best known for creating sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she required pianos with the top removed to allow her to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if additional recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, demonstrates that that drive reached back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she blends these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an improviser in complete command. It’s exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

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

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck describe Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to educate herself 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.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career 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 saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet