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While browsing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a battered tape 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 little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she requested pianos with the top removed to allow her to get inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if further recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

In later 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 trying to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, demonstrates that that impulse extended back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she blends these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an improviser in total mastery. This is electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She received her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 saw early on the huge potential of the internet