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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she asked for pianos with the top removed to allow her to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if further recordings were available. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also included some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been public about her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer 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 later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist trying to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, shows that that desire extended back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced 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 dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she fuses these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an improviser in full control. That's exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later 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, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself 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.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans 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 suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active 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 saw early on the huge potential of the internet