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While browsing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was best known for producing sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she asked for pianos with the top removed to make it easier to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if further recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been public about her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through meditative practices all came out 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 attempting to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, shows that that desire stretched back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she merges these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an artist in total mastery. It’s exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She received her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

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

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later describe Williams "one of the greatest 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. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts 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 soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work 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 fundamental principles," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 recognized early the great promise of the internet