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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was most famous for producing lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she requested pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if further recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician attempting to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, reveals that that impulse extended back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals 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."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she merges these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she developed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in complete command. That's thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She was given 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 commented: Williams detached a panel from beneath 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 stated.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the following 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 similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to learn about the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation 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 turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she stated 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 drove her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet