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Flipping through the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was most famous for creating vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she requested pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if further recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice 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 pianist attempting to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, demonstrates that that drive extended back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer 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 attracted to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "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."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an performer in total mastery. That's electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to 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, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts 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 quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased 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 arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling 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 recognized early the great promise of the internet