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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for making sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she requested pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to access the interior 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 ask if further recordings existed. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also included some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe 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) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist trying to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, demonstrates that that desire extended back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist 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 force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she fuses these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an performer in complete command. That's exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She received her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures 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. But he saw her potential: a week later, he introduced her to 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 just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired 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 "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain 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

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet