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Perusing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was most famous for making lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she asked for pianos without the cover to make it easier to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if further recordings existed. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been public about 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 peace she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist seeking to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, reveals that that drive extended back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she fuses these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an performer in total mastery. It’s electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

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 recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later call Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts 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 rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena 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."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home 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