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Perusing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was best known for creating sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she required pianos with the top removed to make it easier to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if further recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had long since retired years earlier, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her struggles after 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 serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

In later 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 expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, shows that that desire extended back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker expresses 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 studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing 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."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she merges these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an improviser in full control. This is thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She was given her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck call 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became 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 veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet