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Flipping through the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she required pianos without the cover to allow her to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if any more recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Even though she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered 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 facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician seeking to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, reveals that that drive extended back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she merges these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an performer in full control. This is thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself 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 quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving 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 emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, 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 chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 saw early on the great promise of the internet