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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was most famous for making sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she requested pianos without the cover to allow her to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings existed. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two live, two studio creations. Even though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also included some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident 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 escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, demonstrates that that desire extended back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an improviser in total mastery. That's exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck call 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving 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 turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way 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 organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period 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 going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet