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Flipping through the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she asked for pianos with the top removed to allow her to get inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if additional recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. And though she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace 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 artist seeking to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, reveals that that impulse stretched back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "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 artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she fuses these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an improviser in total mastery. This is thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She received her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set 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 learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. Yet he recognized 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 signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts 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.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran'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 "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field 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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the great promise of the internet