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While browsing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was best known for making sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she required pianos with the top removed to allow her to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if further recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. And though she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also included some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published 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 says. Williams had been open regarding her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist seeking to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, shows that that drive stretched back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

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))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she merges these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an performer in full control. It’s electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

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, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys 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 quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth 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 album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "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 faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet