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Flipping through the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was best known for creating lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she requested pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if further recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Although she had long since retired years earlier, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

In later 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 break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she merges these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an artist in full control. That's exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to study 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 rapidly felt disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly 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 liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period 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 relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the great promise of the internet