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While browsing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was most famous for making vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she asked for pianos with the top removed to facilitate to get inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if additional recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also included some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. 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 meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 pianist attempting to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, shows that that impulse extended back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she merges these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an performer in total mastery. It’s exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from below 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 trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising 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.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck 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, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the huge potential of the internet