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Perusing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was most famous for making lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she requested pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks 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 performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 artist seeking to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an improviser in full control. This is electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently experimented 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 recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disillusioned 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 turned into 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 primary means of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability 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. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field 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

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the active 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 saw early on the huge potential of the internet