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Perusing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was most famous for making sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she asked for pianos without the cover to facilitate to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if additional recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Even though she had long since retired some time before, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence 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) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist attempting to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, shows that that desire reached back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist 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))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she blends these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an artist in full control. It’s electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

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 chastised her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck call Williams "one of the greatest 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. However, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about 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.

After moving 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 became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet