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Perusing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was best known for making lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she required pianos without the cover to facilitate to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if any more recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Even though she had long since retired years earlier, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 trying to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, shows that that drive reached back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer 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 captivated by the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Shortly after seeing 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 understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she merges these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an artist in total mastery. That's electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She received her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Initially, Williams learned 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 chastised her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later call 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, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased 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

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet