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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was best known for creating vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if additional recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also included some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, reveals that that desire extended back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent 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 worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard 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. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she honed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in complete command. It’s exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Initially, Williams studied 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 scolded her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

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, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly 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 liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet