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Flipping through the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and put out 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. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was best known for creating lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she requested pianos without the cover to facilitate to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if additional recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident 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 artist seeking to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, demonstrates that that impulse reached back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she fuses these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an performer in full control. It’s electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She was given her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Early on, Williams trained in 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 chastised her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – 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 remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her preferred musical arena 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

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet