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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across 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 copied at home, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was most famous for creating sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she asked for pianos without the cover to allow her to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if further recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two live, two studio creations. Although she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued 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 vocal concerning her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 pianist trying to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, shows that that drive extended back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she honed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an performer in total mastery. That's thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later describe 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, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, decidedly ideological 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 chosen artistic field 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet