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Perusing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was best known for making lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she requested pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if any more recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two live, two recorded in a studio. And though she had long since retired previously, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter recounts.

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. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

In later 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 musician seeking to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, shows that that drive stretched back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in complete command. It’s exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering 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 describe Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys 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 soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired 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 "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant 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 great promise of the internet