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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

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

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she required pianos without the cover to allow her to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if further recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician seeking to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, reveals that that desire extended back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she merges these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an performer in total mastery. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later describe Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies 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 quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling 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 huge potential of the internet