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Flipping through the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was most famous for producing lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she requested pianos without the cover to make it easier to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if any more recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Even though she had long since retired years earlier, she also included some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released 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 says. Williams had been open regarding her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist seeking to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, reveals that that impulse stretched back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she blends these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she honed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an improviser in total mastery. It’s exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She was given her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "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. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

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

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, 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, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disenchanted 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 outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory evolved into 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 going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet