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Perusing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was most famous for making lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she required pianos lacking the lid to allow her to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if additional recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also included some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through meditative practices 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 musician attempting to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, demonstrates that that impulse extended back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she fuses these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an artist in total mastery. That's electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

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 immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating 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 forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," 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 continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated 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 rarely discussed her experiences as a trans 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 cruel nonsense she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet