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Perusing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was most famous for making lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she requested pianos with the top removed to allow her to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if additional recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. And though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through meditative practices all were evident 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 artist seeking to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, shows that that impulse reached back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she blends these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in total mastery. It’s electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She received her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Williams originally learned 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. But he saw her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, 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 quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist'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 "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she penned 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 seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet