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Perusing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for making sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if further recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been public about her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through meditative practices all came out 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 musician trying to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, reveals that that impulse stretched back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she blends these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an performer in full control. This is exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later describe 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, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to study 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.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of landing performances – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, direct, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her desired musical domain 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 arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet