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Flipping through the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was most famous for producing vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she requested pianos lacking the lid to allow her to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. And though she had long since retired previously, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through meditative practices 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 attempting to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, reveals that that drive stretched back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an performer in total mastery. That's thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck 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, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path 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 moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet