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While browsing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and issued 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 producing sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if any more recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Even though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also included some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist seeking to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, reveals that that impulse extended back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she merges these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an performer in total mastery. It’s electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to study 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 disappointed with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met 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 low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly 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 liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena 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

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the huge potential of the internet