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Perusing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was most famous for making lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she required pianos lacking the lid to allow her to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if any more recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also included some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident 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 pianist trying to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, demonstrates that that drive extended back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she blends these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she honed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an artist in total mastery. This is thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She received her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon 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: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later describe Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to educate herself 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 soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove 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

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet