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Flipping through the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was most famous for producing vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she required pianos without the cover to facilitate to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if additional recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been public about her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice 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 musician seeking to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, demonstrates that that desire stretched back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she honed in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an improviser in full control. This is electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

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

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck refer to 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, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to study 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 rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain 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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 saw early on the great promise of the internet