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While browsing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was most famous for making vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she asked for pianos without the cover to allow her to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if additional recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. Although she had long since retired years earlier, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 musician seeking to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, shows that that impulse reached back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she fuses these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an artist in complete command. That's thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She was given her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from beneath 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 explained.

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

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck call Williams "among the finest 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to study 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 disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," 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 am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, openly 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 chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path arced towards 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 relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet