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While browsing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was best known for producing sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she asked for pianos with the top removed to facilitate to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet 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 any more recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based 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 expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, demonstrates that that impulse reached back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she blends these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she honed in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an artist in full control. That's thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She received her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters 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: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck describe 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, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to study 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 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 emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant 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 understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet