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Flipping through the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she requested pianos lacking the lid to allow her to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings existed. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile 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 facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been public about her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 seeking to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, demonstrates that that desire extended back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated 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 was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after seeing 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 relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an performer in complete command. That's electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Early on, Williams 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 reprimanded her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later call Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disillusioned 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 became a strident, public 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 securing work – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet