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While browsing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was most famous for creating lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she asked for pianos without the cover to allow her to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if additional recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two live, two studio creations. Even though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery 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 her subsequent 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 musician trying to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, shows that that impulse reached back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist 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 attracted to the power of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an performer in complete command. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She was given her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale 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 beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical 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.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician'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 "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet