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Perusing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked 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 accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was best known for making sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she asked for pianos with the top removed to allow her to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if any more recordings existed. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two live, two studio creations. Even though she had long since retired years earlier, she also included some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

In later 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 musician seeking to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, shows that that impulse reached back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an artist in complete command. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

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, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist'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 getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, decidedly ideological 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 chosen artistic field 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling 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 understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet