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Flipping through the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was best known for producing sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she asked for pianos with the top removed to allow her to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if any more recordings were available. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two studio creations. And though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

In later 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 pianist trying to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, demonstrates that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she fuses these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an performer in full control. That's exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Williams originally 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 improvising 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 call Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disappointed 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 emerged as a outspoken, vocal 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 profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period 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 understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet