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Flipping through the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she asked for pianos with the top removed to make it easier to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if additional recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two live, two made in the studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 attempting to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, shows that that desire stretched back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

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))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she merges these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an performer in complete command. It’s exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck call Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant 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 saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet