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Flipping through the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was best known for producing sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she requested pianos without the cover to allow her to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks 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 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Although she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 pianist attempting to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says 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 attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an improviser in full control. This is thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to Williams "one of the greatest 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public 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 landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint 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 saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet