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Perusing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on 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 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 sonic explorer – for her concerts, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if additional recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her struggles following 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 serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out 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 artist attempting to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, shows that that drive stretched back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she blends these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an artist in full control. It’s electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck call 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 study 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 quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure 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. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet