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While browsing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to get inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if further recordings were available. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two live, two studio creations. Even though she had long since retired some time before, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been public about her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

In her subsequent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician trying to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, demonstrates that that desire stretched back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic impressions: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals 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."

Artistic Forebears

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully 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 body of work extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in complete command. This is electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She obtained her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Early on, Williams trained in 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 improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later call Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving 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 outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove 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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in 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 recognized early the great promise of the internet