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Perusing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was best known for creating lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she asked for pianos without the cover to allow her to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if further recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Although she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist attempting to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, demonstrates that that desire extended back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she blends these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she honed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an artist in complete command. That's thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck describe 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, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches 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.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up 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 "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have endured 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 active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet