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Perusing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she required pianos without the cover to make it easier to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if additional recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based 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 intriguingly altered piano resonances, shows that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an performer in complete command. It’s electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She received her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from under 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 stated.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck call 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, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts 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 disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public 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 landing performances – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the liner notes 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 seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. 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."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet