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While browsing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was most famous for making vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she requested pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if additional recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Even though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also included some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician attempting to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, demonstrates that that drive stretched back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano before this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she merges these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she honed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an improviser in complete command. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She was given her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later call 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 extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain 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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant 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 great promise of the internet