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While browsing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was most famous for producing vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – during her performances, she required pianos with the top removed to make it easier to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if additional recordings were available. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Although she had long since retired previously, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," says Potter.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been public about her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist trying to transcend expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, shows that that impulse extended back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars dissolving into biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but knew little of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she blends these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an artist in complete command. This is thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck describe Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards 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 poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. After time 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 going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the great promise of the internet