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Flipping through the jazz section at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was most famous for making sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she required pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if any more recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two made in the studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also included some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist seeking to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, demonstrates that that impulse reached back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she fuses these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an artist in complete command. That's electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Initially, Williams studied 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 chastised her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, Brubeck refer to Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches 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.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability 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. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about 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 cruel nonsense she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through 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