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While browsing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was most famous for creating vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she requested pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to get inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if any more recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Even though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also included some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 pianist seeking to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, shows that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Not long after witnessing 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 connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an improviser in total mastery. This is thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. 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 educate herself 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 rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "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 faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the huge potential of the internet