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Flipping through the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for making sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to allow her to get inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if any more recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. And though she had long since retired years earlier, she also included some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been public about her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In later 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 musician trying to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, demonstrates that that desire extended back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she blends these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an improviser in full control. It’s electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She was given her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside 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. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, 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, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, 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 rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the album 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 woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased 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."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet