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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was best known for producing vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she requested pianos lacking the lid to allow her to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if additional recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two live, two studio creations. Although she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist trying to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, reveals that that impulse reached back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she blends these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an improviser in full control. It’s exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She was given her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "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 beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented 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 mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "a top-tier 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 trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to learn about the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran'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 primary means of getting gigs – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet