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Flipping through the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found 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 little bit 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 following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was best known for making lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she requested pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if further recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also included some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

In later 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 attempting to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she merges these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an artist in complete command. This is exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She was given 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 commented: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Initially, Williams studied 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 altering a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck call 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, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys 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 rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality 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, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the great promise of the internet