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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "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."

For a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was most famous for creating lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she requested pianos without the cover to allow her to get inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if further recordings existed. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Even though she had long since retired previously, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. 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. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist trying to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, shows that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker says 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 studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she merges these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she honed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an artist in complete command. It’s exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Initially, Williams studied 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 chastised her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later describe 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 trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to study 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 quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed 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 cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 immense possibilities of the internet