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Perusing 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 seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized 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 without the cover to allow her to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if any more recordings existed. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist seeking to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, reveals that that drive reached back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist 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 power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she merges these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an performer in total mastery. That's exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She was given her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," 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 reprimanded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later describe Williams "among the finest 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. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to study 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 disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating 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 became 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 benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit 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. Following a period in the vibrant 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 great promise of the internet