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Flipping through the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for making vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to allow her to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if additional recordings were available. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. And though she had long since retired some time before, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been public about her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident 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 pianist seeking to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, reveals that that drive extended back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she blends these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an artist in total mastery. This is exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to 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 standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, 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, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to study 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.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career moved toward 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 going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet