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Perusing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was most famous for making lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she requested pianos without the cover to facilitate to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Although she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also included some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been public about her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness 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) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist trying to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, reveals that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she merges these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an artist in total mastery. This is exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set 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 took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

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 immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving 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 turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, decidedly ideological 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 terrible treatment she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet