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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was most famous for making lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she requested pianos lacking the lid to allow her to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if any more recordings were available. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. And though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also included some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist trying to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, reveals that that impulse extended back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an artist in full control. That's exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She received her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later call Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to learn about 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 disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 great promise of the internet