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While browsing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector 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 notes. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement post 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 direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to allow her to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if additional recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 pianist attempting to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, shows that that drive extended back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she blends these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an performer in complete command. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back 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. Encouraged by the senior musician'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 "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure 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 wide-ranging, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her preferred musical arena 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

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active 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