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While browsing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

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

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she required pianos without the cover to allow her to get inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if additional recordings existed. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Although she had long since retired years earlier, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist attempting to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, reveals that that impulse stretched back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist 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 force of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she fuses these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an performer in complete command. This is thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She received her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck call 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, displays her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "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 suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet