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While browsing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she asked for pianos without the cover to allow her to get inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if further recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist trying to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, reveals that that drive stretched back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. 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 attracted to the power of her music, but was largely unaware 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. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she merges these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she honed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an improviser in total mastery. It’s thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to 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 signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet