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Flipping through the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she requested pianos with the top removed to allow her to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if further recordings existed. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. And though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: 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. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist trying to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, shows that that desire stretched back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an performer in total mastery. It’s exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She received her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck describe Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. 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 dedicated efforts to study 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 quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. 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 faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 great promise of the internet