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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was best known for making lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she required pianos with the top removed to allow her to reach inside and pluck 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 see if any more recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis 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) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician attempting to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, demonstrates that that impulse extended back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. 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 drawn to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an artist in full control. That's exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She was given her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

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

Industry Disappointment

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 trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to study the genre – first, to the more modern styles 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.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist'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 primary means of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant 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 huge potential of the internet