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Perusing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist 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 says. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was best known for creating vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she asked for pianos with the top removed to make it easier to get inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if additional recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two live, two made in the studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble 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 seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician seeking to break free of expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, reveals that that impulse reached back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she merges these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a catalog extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an improviser in total mastery. This is electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences 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. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

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, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to educate herself 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 soon grew disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena 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 evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet