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While browsing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for making sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she asked for pianos without the cover to facilitate to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if additional recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Even though she had long since retired some time before, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been public about her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out 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 seeking to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, reveals that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she blends these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in full control. It’s exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from under 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.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences 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: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck call 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, displays her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever 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 disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain 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 moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint 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 recognized early the great promise of the internet