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Perusing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was most famous for making vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she asked for pianos without the cover to allow her to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if further recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also included some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician seeking to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, shows that that drive stretched back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an artist in complete command. It’s exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself 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 quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet