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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she asked for pianos without the cover to make it easier to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if additional recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Although she had long since retired years earlier, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 musician attempting to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, demonstrates that that drive reached back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an performer in total mastery. That's electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later call Williams "among the finest 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back 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 met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the sleeve text 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 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 endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in 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