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Flipping through the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, 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 post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was best known for creating lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she required pianos with the top removed to make it easier to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if additional recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. Although she had long since retired previously, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through 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 trying to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, demonstrates that that drive extended back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she fuses these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an artist in complete command. This is thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She received her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later call Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts 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 fundamental principles," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "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 suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant 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 saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet