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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was best known for making vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she requested pianos lacking the lid to allow her to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if additional recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident 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 musician attempting to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, shows that that desire stretched back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states 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 being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she blends these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an improviser in full control. That's thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She received her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to learn about the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew 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 became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet