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Perusing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for making vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she asked for pianos with the top removed to allow her to get inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if any more recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two live, two made in the studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also included some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her hardships 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 calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits 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 break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, shows that that impulse extended back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she fuses these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an improviser in full control. This is exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

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

Frustration with the Scene

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. 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 quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating 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 low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 recognized early the huge potential of the internet