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While browsing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was most famous for making sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to allow her to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if additional recordings existed. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid-80s – two live, two made in the studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also included some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist attempting to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, demonstrates that that desire stretched back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her surreal-sounding prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "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 understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she blends these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an improviser in complete command. This is thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to Williams "a top-tier 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds 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.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – 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 nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in 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