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Flipping through the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was most famous for making vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to get inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if additional recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist attempting to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, demonstrates that that desire reached back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing 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."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an performer in total mastery. It’s electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire 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 following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to Williams "a top-tier 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. 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 quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity 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. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 huge potential of the internet