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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was most famous for producing lively 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 asked for pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to get inside and play the strings directly – 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 additional recordings existed. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two live, two recorded in a studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits 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 trying to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, shows that that desire extended back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she developed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an artist in complete command. This is electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She received her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck describe 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about 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.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"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 fundamental principles," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the active 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 recognized early the huge potential of the internet