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While browsing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for making vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she asked for pianos without the cover to facilitate to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if further recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. And though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

In later 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 break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, shows that that impulse extended back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she merges these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she developed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an improviser in complete command. That's thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from below 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 explained.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned 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, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to study 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. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet