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While browsing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked 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 issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was best known for producing vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she required pianos with the top removed to allow her to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if any more recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Although she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also included some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through 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 ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist seeking to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, demonstrates that that desire stretched back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer 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 power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she blends these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she developed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an performer in complete command. That's thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later refer to 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, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to educate herself 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.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," 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, direct, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 saw early on the huge potential of the internet