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Perusing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she asked for pianos without the cover to allow her to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if additional recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties 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 meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist trying to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, demonstrates that that impulse extended back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals 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."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she blends these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in complete command. It’s exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to study 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 rapidly felt disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of artists in need.

"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 core values," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena 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. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet