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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out 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 atypical for Williams, who was most famous for making lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she requested pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if any more recordings existed. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through 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 artist trying to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated 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 before this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking 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 cultivated in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an improviser in complete command. That's thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She received her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

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

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist'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 "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," 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, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed 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 cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet