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Perusing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was most famous for producing lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she requested pianos with the top removed to make it easier to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if further recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

In later 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 artist trying to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, demonstrates that that impulse extended back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she fuses these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an artist in complete command. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Initially, Williams 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 chastised her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "one of the greatest 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 extensive studies to educate herself 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 disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed 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 endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active 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 saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet