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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was most famous for making vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she requested pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if any more recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Even though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the 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 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been public about her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist attempting to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, shows that that drive extended back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she blends these new sounds with her own soulful language 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 effervescent force of an performer in complete command. It’s electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She received her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to study 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 soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, openly political 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 desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet