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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was best known for producing sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she requested pianos with the top removed to facilitate to get inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if any more recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two live, two studio creations. And though she had long since retired years earlier, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her struggles after 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 her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 trying to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, reveals that that drive stretched back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

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 captivated by the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she blends these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an performer in total mastery. It’s exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck describe 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, displays 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 soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the huge potential of the internet