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Flipping through the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she asked for pianos with the top removed to make it easier to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if additional recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe 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 trying to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, reveals that that impulse stretched back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she fuses these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in complete command. It’s electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She obtained 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 noted: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later describe Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to learn about the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician'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 securing work – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "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 faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the huge potential of the internet