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Perusing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she required pianos without the cover to make it easier to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if additional recordings were available. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

In later 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 attempting to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, demonstrates that that impulse stretched back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she blends these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she developed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an improviser in complete command. That's electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to learn about the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating 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 forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"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 core values," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense 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 bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet