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Flipping through the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she required pianos with the top removed to facilitate to access the interior 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 inquire if further recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist trying to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, demonstrates that that impulse stretched back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" 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 had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an artist in complete command. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She was given her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to study 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 quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as 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 landing performances – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity 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 broad in scope, 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 inhumane bullshit she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 saw early on the huge potential of the internet