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Flipping through the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "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."

For a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was most famous for producing lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she required pianos without the cover to allow her to get inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if further recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had long since retired some time before, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery 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 later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician attempting to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, shows that that desire stretched back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she blends these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an artist in full control. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She was given her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck describe Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to educate herself 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 rapidly felt disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into 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 key way of securing work – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans 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 cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet