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Perusing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was most famous for making sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to allow her to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if further recordings were available. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been public about her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

In later 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 artist attempting to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, reveals that that impulse reached back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she fuses these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an artist in complete command. This is exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

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, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, 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 rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet