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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was most famous for producing vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she requested pianos without the cover to facilitate to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if further recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity 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 musician trying to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she fuses these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an improviser in total mastery. It’s electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck describe 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, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever 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.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the liner 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. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 recognized early the great promise of the internet