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Perusing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was best known for producing lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she requested pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if any more recordings existed. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 artist trying to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, shows that that desire extended back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship 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 radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an artist in full control. That's thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She was given her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from under 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 wrote.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later call Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet