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Perusing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by 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 primarily recognized for creating vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if additional recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties after 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 serenity she found through meditative practices 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 artist seeking to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, reveals that that impulse reached back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she blends these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an improviser in complete command. That's exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She was given her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering 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.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later describe Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," 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 remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint 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 huge potential of the internet