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While browsing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he says. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she asked for pianos with the top removed to allow her to get inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if further recordings existed. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Although she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions 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 meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out 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 artist trying to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, demonstrates that that impulse extended back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. 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 force of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "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

These modified tones have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she fuses these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an artist in complete command. That's electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. 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 commented: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented 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 gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later describe 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, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"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 fundamental principles," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit 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. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet