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Flipping through the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was best known for producing lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she required pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if further recordings existed. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. Even though she had long since retired previously, she also included some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 seeking to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, shows that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she blends these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she developed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an artist in total mastery. It’s thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She was given her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck refer to Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity 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 eclectic, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "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 suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet