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Flipping through the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was most famous for producing sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she requested pianos without the cover to allow her to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if any more recordings were available. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: 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, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through 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 transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, shows that that drive extended back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she merges these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an improviser in complete command. That's thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached 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 classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck 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, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving 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 became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the great promise of the internet