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While browsing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was most famous for creating sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she requested pianos lacking the lid to allow her to get inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if additional recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two live, two studio creations. And though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness 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 pianist trying to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, reveals that that drive stretched back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she honed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an improviser in total mastery. That's exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She received her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck describe 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, displays her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical 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.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet