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Perusing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she asked for pianos without the cover to facilitate to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if additional recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two live, two made in the studio. Although she had long since retired years earlier, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been public about her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out 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 artist seeking to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano resonances, demonstrates that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she fuses these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she developed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an improviser in full control. It’s electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from under 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 wrote.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later call Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to educate herself 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 quickly became disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to 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 low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to organise, communicate and stand up 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 eclectic, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in 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