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Perusing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was best known for making vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she asked for pianos without the cover to make it easier to reach inside and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if any more recordings existed. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Although she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been public about her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist seeking to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, demonstrates that that desire reached back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" 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 attracted to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Not long after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she fuses these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an performer in total mastery. This is thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She received her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "a top-tier 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. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating 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 emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity 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. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet