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While browsing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was best known for creating vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to allow her to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if additional recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Even though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been public about her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits 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 break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, reveals that that impulse extended back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she merges these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an improviser in complete command. That's exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from below 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.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend 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 rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender 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 inhumane bullshit she must have suffered 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 moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to 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