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While browsing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was best known for creating vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she requested pianos lacking the lid to allow her to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if further recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits 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 transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she blends these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she honed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an artist in complete command. This is electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. But he saw 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 describe Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to educate herself 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 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 elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became 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 primary means of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "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 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. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the great promise of the internet