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Flipping through the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was best known for producing sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she required pianos without the cover to facilitate to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if additional recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Although she had long since retired years earlier, she also included some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships 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 calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist attempting to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, shows that that drive reached back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard 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 dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she merges these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an performer in full control. It’s exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from below 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 wrote.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later call Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to study 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 quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged 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 "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have faced 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 relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet