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While browsing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize 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 fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was best known for producing vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she requested pianos with the top removed to make it easier to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if further recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused 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 break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, reveals that that desire reached back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she blends these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an artist in total mastery. It’s electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She was given her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

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

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later describe Williams "among the finest 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to study 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 disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed 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."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home 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