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Perusing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was best known for creating lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she requested pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if additional recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. And though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles after 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 meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist trying to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, reveals that that drive extended back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker states 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 captivated by the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she merges these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an improviser in complete command. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Early on, Williams studied 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 scolded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later call 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, exhibits 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 more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 recognized early the huge potential of the internet