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

As a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was best known for making vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she asked for pianos with the top removed to facilitate to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if further recordings were available. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist seeking to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, demonstrates that that desire reached back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she fuses these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she honed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an artist in full control. That's thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck refer to Williams "among the finest 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to learn about 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 disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired 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 "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have faced 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, settling in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet