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Perusing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was best known for making lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she requested pianos without the cover to facilitate to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if any more recordings were available. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through meditative practices all shone through 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 artist trying to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, demonstrates that that impulse stretched back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she blends these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an improviser in complete command. This is electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

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

Jazz World Disillusionment

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, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed 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 cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet