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While browsing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was most famous for producing lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if any more recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. And though she had long since retired some time before, she also included some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 musician trying to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, demonstrates that that impulse extended back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she fuses these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an performer in total mastery. That's electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck call 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain 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

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet