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While browsing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was most famous for making sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she required pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if additional recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two studio creations. Even though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through meditative practices all shone through 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 artist attempting to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, shows that that impulse extended back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" 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 drawn to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she merges these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an artist in complete command. This is exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Early on, Williams learned 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 chastised her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, 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, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired 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 low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet