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Perusing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist 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 personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she requested pianos lacking the lid to allow her to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if further recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Although she had long since retired years earlier, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 artist trying to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, reveals that that impulse stretched back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states 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 captivated by the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she blends these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in complete command. This is electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, 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 equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys 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 rapidly felt disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged 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 "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – 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 unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 immense possibilities of the internet