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Perusing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she requested pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings existed. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician trying to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, demonstrates that that impulse reached back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she merges these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in total mastery. That's electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She received her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to study 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 disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, openly political 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 desired musical domain 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. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet