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Flipping through the jazz section at a vinyl outlet 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 detached from the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she asked for pianos with the top removed to facilitate to get inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if further recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Even though she had long since retired some time before, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been public about her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist trying to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, shows that that desire extended back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals 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: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she merges these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an performer in full control. That's thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She received her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from under 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 trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck describe Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about 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 rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "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 endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet