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While browsing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she asked for pianos with the top removed to allow her to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if additional recordings were available. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles 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 her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist attempting to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, shows that that drive extended back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s 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))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity 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, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she fuses these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an artist in complete command. It’s electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

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

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck describe Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. 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 study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds 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 was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, decidedly ideological 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 desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active 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 saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet