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Flipping through the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was most famous for producing vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she asked for pianos without the cover to allow her to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if any more recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Although she had long since retired some time before, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her hardships 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 meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist seeking to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she fuses these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an performer in complete command. It’s exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "among the finest 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts 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 quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate 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 wide-ranging, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet