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Flipping through the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was most famous for creating lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she required pianos with the top removed to make it easier 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. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if additional recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Even though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released 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 states. Williams had been open regarding her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through meditative practices all shone through 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 pianist seeking to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, reveals that that impulse stretched back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she blends these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an performer in full control. This is electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

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

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain 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 evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet