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Perusing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was best known for creating lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she requested pianos with the top removed to facilitate to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if further recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also included some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist trying to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, shows that that drive reached back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after attending 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 understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she fuses these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an improviser in complete command. It’s thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She received her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from under 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 explained.

Early on, Williams learned 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 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.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later 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, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to learn about 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 soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 saw early on the huge potential of the internet