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While browsing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she required pianos with the top removed to make it easier to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if any more recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Even though she had long since retired some time before, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 pianist attempting to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, shows that that drive reached back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she merges these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an performer in total mastery. It’s exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, 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 placed it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck call Williams "a top-tier 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful 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 disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating 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 emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans 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 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. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home 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