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While browsing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if further recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from 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 synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist attempting to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, shows that that drive reached back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she merges these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she developed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in full control. This is electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Early on, Williams studied 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 scolded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck refer to Williams "a top-tier 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 signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation 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 poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet