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While browsing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for making sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she asked for pianos with the top removed to make it easier to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if additional recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. And though she had long since retired some time before, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been public about her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist trying to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, demonstrates that that drive extended back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she blends these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an artist in complete command. That's electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

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

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck describe Williams "a top-tier 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. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys 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 rapidly felt disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense 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. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet