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While browsing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was best known for making lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she requested pianos with the top removed to facilitate to get inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if any more recordings were available. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. And though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been public about her struggles after 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 were evident 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 seeking to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, reveals that that desire extended back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she blends these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an improviser in complete command. That's thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She was given her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "among the finest 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 dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating 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 turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "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 faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 recognized early the huge potential of the internet