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While browsing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating vibrant 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 requested pianos with the top removed to make it easier to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if any more recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. And though she had long since retired years earlier, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been public about her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused 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 escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, shows that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows 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. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated 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. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she merges these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an artist in full control. That's exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he brought her 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating 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 emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet