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Perusing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out 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. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was best known for producing sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to allow her to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if further recordings were available. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two live, two studio creations. Although she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also included some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been public about her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist seeking to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into biting, staccato 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))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she blends these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she honed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an performer in full control. It’s electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck call Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "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 suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path 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 relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the great promise of the internet