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While browsing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she required pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to get inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if additional recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also included some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician attempting to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, reveals that that drive extended back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker says 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 attending school 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. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an improviser in complete command. It’s exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off 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 wrote.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later describe Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about 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 disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, decidedly ideological 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 preferred musical arena 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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in 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