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Flipping through the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she asked for pianos with the top removed to make it easier to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if further recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist seeking to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, demonstrates that that desire reached back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she merges these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an performer in total mastery. This is exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She was given her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies 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 rapidly felt disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field 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."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet