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Perusing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was most famous for creating vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she required pianos without the cover to make it easier to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if further recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two live, two studio creations. Even though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through 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 ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 trying to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, demonstrates that that drive extended back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "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 known to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she fuses these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an performer in total mastery. This is thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She received her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the hipper sounds 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.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure 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, direct, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans 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 inhumane bullshit she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active 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