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Perusing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she requested pianos lacking the lid to allow her to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Even though she had long since retired years earlier, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "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. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician trying to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, shows that that impulse reached back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she fuses these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she honed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an performer in full control. That's thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She was given her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

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

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later 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 trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public 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 corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for 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 eclectic, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 huge potential of the internet