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While browsing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was most famous for creating vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she requested pianos with the top removed to make it easier to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if additional recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. And though she had long since retired some time before, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

In later 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 tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, reveals that that desire extended back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she fuses these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in full control. This is electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She was given her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts 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 soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, 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 writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field 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

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 recognized early the huge potential of the internet