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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was most famous for making vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if additional recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also included some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been public about her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through meditative practices 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 attempting to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, shows that that desire stretched back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she fuses these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an artist in complete command. That's electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She received her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

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 improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "one of the greatest 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 trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to educate herself 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 disenchanted 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 became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena 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

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active 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