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While browsing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was best known for creating sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she required pianos without the cover to make it easier to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if further recordings existed. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Even though she had long since retired years earlier, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

In later 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 attempting to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, shows that that impulse reached back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she blends these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in total mastery. It’s electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck call Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove 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."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant 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 great promise of the internet