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While browsing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she required pianos without the cover to make it easier to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if any more recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also included some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, shows that that drive stretched back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in complete command. That's exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She was given her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

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

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck refer to 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, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving 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 became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up 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 wide-ranging, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit 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 arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in 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