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While browsing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was most famous for producing lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Although she had long since retired previously, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her hardships after 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 peace she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, shows that that impulse stretched back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

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))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she blends these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she honed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in total mastery. This is thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck refer to Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles 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.

Following her relocation 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 turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain 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

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet