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Perusing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she required pianos lacking the lid to allow her to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that rarely made it on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if further recordings existed. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. And though she had long since retired years earlier, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 seeking to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, reveals that that impulse extended back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she merges these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she honed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an artist in total mastery. This is thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She was given her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "one of the greatest 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 characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant 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 immense possibilities of the internet