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Perusing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight 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. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was most famous for creating lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to get inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if any more recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had long since retired some time before, she also included some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist attempting to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, demonstrates that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing 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."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she fuses these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an performer in full control. This is electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits 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 hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure 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, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant 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 recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet