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While browsing the jazz section 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 ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was best known for making sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she requested pianos without the cover to make it easier to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if any more recordings existed. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered 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, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been public about her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician trying to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, reveals that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after seeing 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 relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in full control. This is exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, 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 trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory 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 saw early on the great promise of the internet