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Perusing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was most famous for creating sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she asked for pianos with the top removed to allow her to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if any more recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been public about her struggles after 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 calmness 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 seeking to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, demonstrates that that desire stretched back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she fuses these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an artist in complete command. This is electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures 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. But he saw her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck call 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, displays her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about 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.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran'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 "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"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 fundamental principles," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain 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 arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet