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Flipping through the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was best known for making sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she asked for pianos without the cover to allow her to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if further recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. And though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through meditative practices 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 artist trying to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, reveals that that impulse stretched back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard 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 dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Soon after attending 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 relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she merges these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an improviser in total mastery. That's thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached 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.

Williams originally trained in 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 chastised her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased 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

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet