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Flipping through the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was most famous for producing vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she required pianos with the top removed to facilitate to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been public about her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 artist attempting to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, reveals that that impulse stretched back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental 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. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she merges these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she honed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an improviser in full control. This is thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Initially, Williams trained in 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 scolded her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck describe 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity 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 broad in scope, direct, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet