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While browsing the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was most famous for making sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she requested pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if further recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been public about her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based 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 convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, reveals that that drive stretched back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully 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 discography spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an artist in full control. It’s electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off 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 stated.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, 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.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 recognized early the great promise of the internet