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While browsing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was best known for producing lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she requested pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if further recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Although she had long since retired previously, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me probably 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 altered piano works that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician seeking to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, demonstrates that that impulse extended back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw 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 surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she blends these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she honed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an performer in full control. This is exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

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 scolded her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back 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 was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have endured 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. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the huge potential of the internet