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Flipping through the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

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

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to get inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if additional recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also included some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been public about her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 attempting to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, shows that that desire reached back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she blends these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an improviser in complete command. It’s thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She received her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, 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, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about 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 quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation 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 emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed 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 cruel nonsense she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory arced towards 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 moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet