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Flipping through the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she requested pianos with the top removed to allow her to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings existed. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

In later electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician attempting to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, demonstrates that that drive reached back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist 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 intensity of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Soon after witnessing 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 understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an improviser in total mastery. It’s electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She received her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to Williams "among the finest 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds 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.

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 turned into a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a commercial business 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 fundamental principles," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet