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While browsing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she asked for pianos with the top removed to make it easier to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if any more recordings were available. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two made in the studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been public about her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist seeking to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, shows that that drive stretched back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

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))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals 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 artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she blends these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an improviser in total mastery. This is exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered 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 equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies 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 quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the huge potential of the internet