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Flipping through the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was most famous for making lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she requested pianos without the cover to allow her to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if further recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Even though she had long since retired some time before, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been public about her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident 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 attempting to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, shows that that drive reached back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states 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 captivated by the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she fuses these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated 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 full control. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Early on, Williams trained in 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 embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later describe Williams "one of the greatest 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran'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 "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet