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While browsing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to highlight 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 fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was best known for making vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she required pianos with the top removed to allow her to get inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if additional recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through meditative practices all shone through 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 seeking to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, shows that that drive reached back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she honed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an artist in full control. This is electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself 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 rapidly felt disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "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 suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory 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 moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet