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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she requested pianos with the top removed to make it easier to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if further recordings existed. She provided four recordings of prepared 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 enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. 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 peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist attempting to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, reveals that that impulse reached back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" 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 prior to this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "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 technical precursors: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an artist in total mastery. This is electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, 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 next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck describe Williams "one of the greatest 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet