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While browsing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was best known for producing sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a facet that rarely made it on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if further recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Although she had long since retired previously, she also included some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through meditative practices 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 escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she merges these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an improviser in full control. This is thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck describe Williams "among the finest 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 trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys 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 disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

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