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Flipping through the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off 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."

As a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was most famous for creating sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she required pianos without the cover to allow her to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if further recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Although she had long since retired previously, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist seeking to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, reveals that that desire extended back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she blends these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an performer in complete command. That's exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She was given her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Early on, Williams learned 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 chastised her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out 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. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist'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 key way of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about 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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet