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Flipping through the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she asked for pianos without the cover to allow her to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if further recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence 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) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist seeking to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, shows that that desire stretched back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an artist in total mastery. That's electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She received her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising 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.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later refer to 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, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to learn about 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 disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly 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 liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet