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While browsing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was best known for making sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she required pianos with the top removed to make it easier to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if any more recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Although she had long since retired previously, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

In later 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 musician attempting to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, demonstrates that that desire extended back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she fuses these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an improviser in complete command. That's thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from below 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.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences 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 gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck describe 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to learn about the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered 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 meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up 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 eclectic, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "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."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling 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