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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she requested pianos lacking the lid to allow her to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if additional recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also included some recent work. "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 issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident 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 musician attempting to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, shows that that drive extended back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an performer in total mastery. That's electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She received her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "among the finest 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 characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet