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Perusing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "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 issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she requested pianos with the top removed to facilitate to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if any more recordings existed. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. And though she had long since retired some time before, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out 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 artist attempting to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, demonstrates that that drive stretched back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she blends these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an improviser in total mastery. That's thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

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

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later call Williams "among the finest 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, 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 soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating 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 outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment 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 lived in 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 saw early on the great promise of the internet