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Flipping through the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she asked for pianos with the top removed to make it easier to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if further recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist attempting to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, demonstrates that that desire stretched back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "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 known to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she blends these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an improviser in total mastery. That's thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to Williams "among the finest 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 characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches 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.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to 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 poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, 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 preferred musical arena 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

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the huge potential of the internet