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Perusing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for making vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if any more recordings were available. She responded with 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 included some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist attempting to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, shows that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she merges these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an performer in full control. This is electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Early on, Williams learned 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 improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "one of the greatest 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to educate herself 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 rapidly felt disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet