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Perusing the jazz section at a local record store 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 come off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she asked for pianos without the cover to allow her to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if any more recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

In later 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 trying to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, reveals that that desire extended back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she merges these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an improviser in complete command. That's exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, 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, exhibits 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 tracing a path back 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 encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into 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 primary means of securing work – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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