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Flipping through the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was best known for creating lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she asked for pianos without the cover to facilitate to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if additional recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Although she had long since retired previously, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been public about her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused 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 transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, demonstrates that that drive stretched back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she blends these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an performer in full control. This is thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

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

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later call Williams "a top-tier 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, 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 chased 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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet