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Perusing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was best known for making vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she requested pianos with the top removed to allow her to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if additional recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician trying to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, shows that that desire stretched back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but knew little 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 says. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she blends these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an improviser in total mastery. That's thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces 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: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later call Williams "among the finest 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 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 moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew 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 became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet