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Perusing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was best known for making vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she requested pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if additional recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. And though she had long since retired years earlier, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been public about her hardships 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 shone through in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician attempting to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, shows that that desire stretched back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she fuses these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an performer in complete command. This is thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She received her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures 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. 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

Subsequently, 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles 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 met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity 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. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field 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."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet