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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was best known for making vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she required pianos without the cover to allow her to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if additional recordings existed. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. And though she had long since retired some time before, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. 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 serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through 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 pianist seeking to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she blends these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an artist in total mastery. This is thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded 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 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, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans 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 endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet