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Perusing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she asked for pianos without the cover to make it easier to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings were available. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two studio creations. And though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

In later 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 musician trying to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, demonstrates that that impulse extended back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she blends these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an artist in full control. It’s exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to Williams "one of the greatest 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 signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about 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 quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have faced 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 relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet