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Flipping through the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was most famous for producing sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she requested pianos lacking the lid to allow her to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if any more recordings existed. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. And though she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been public about her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through meditative practices 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 attempting to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, shows that that desire extended back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Soon after witnessing 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 known to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an artist in total mastery. It’s thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She obtained her first vertical 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 below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck refer to Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field 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."

A Journey of Independence

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 moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet