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While browsing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she asked for pianos with the top removed to facilitate to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if any more recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. And though she had long since retired years earlier, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued 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 vocal concerning her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

In later 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 musician attempting to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, reveals that that drive reached back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard 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 until this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she fuses these novel textures 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, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an performer in complete command. It’s exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She was given her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck call Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena 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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet