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Flipping through 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 appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was best known for creating lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she asked for pianos without the cover to facilitate to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if additional recordings existed. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two live, two studio creations. And though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician trying to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, reveals that that impulse stretched back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "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 understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an artist in full control. It’s exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Initially, Williams learned 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 chastised her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, 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 "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 signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about 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 soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran'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 "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly 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 eclectic, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet