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Perusing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was most famous for creating vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she required pianos lacking the lid to allow her to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if any more recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two live, two studio creations. Although she had long since retired years earlier, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician attempting to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, demonstrates that that impulse reached back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" 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 drawn to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she blends these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an performer in total mastery. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from under 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 stated.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "a top-tier 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt 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 senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly 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 wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans 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 endured 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 bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in 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