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Flipping through the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was most famous for producing vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she requested pianos with the top removed to facilitate to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if additional recordings existed. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

In later 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 attempting to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, reveals that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she blends these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in complete command. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Williams originally trained in 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 reprimanded her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later 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 characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys 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 soon grew disenchanted 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 outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet