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Flipping through the jazz records at a vinyl outlet 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 come off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was best known for producing sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she requested pianos without the cover to make it easier to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if additional recordings had been made. 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 some time before, she also included some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist trying to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, shows that that drive stretched back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she fuses these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an improviser in complete command. It’s exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She received 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 noted: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented 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 gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure 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 eclectic, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased 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

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