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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was most famous for creating lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she asked for pianos with the top removed to make it easier to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if any more recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. And though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident 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 artist attempting to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, demonstrates that that impulse extended back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician 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))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she blends these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she honed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an artist in complete command. That's exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She received her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire 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: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

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, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into 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 main method of getting gigs – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory moved toward 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 going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet