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While browsing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being 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 most famous for producing lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she asked for pianos without the cover to make it easier to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings were available. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Although she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also included some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

In later 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 break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she fuses these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an artist in full control. This is exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently experimented 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 took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck describe Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to study the genre – first, to the more modern styles 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 encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly 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 stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, decidedly ideological 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 cruel nonsense she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet