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Perusing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was most famous for producing vibrant 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 lacking the lid to facilitate to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if further recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Although she had long since retired previously, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 musician seeking to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, demonstrates that that drive extended back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she blends these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an artist in total mastery. This is thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

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 scolded her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to 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, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for 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 broad in scope, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet