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Flipping through the jazz records 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 classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was best known for making sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she asked for pianos without the cover to facilitate to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if any more recordings were available. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also included some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits 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 trying to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, demonstrates that that drive reached back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. 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 power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she blends these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in total mastery. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned 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 similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to learn about the genre – first, to the hipper sounds 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.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain 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

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet