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While browsing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was best known for creating vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she required pianos without the cover to facilitate to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if any more recordings were available. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two live, two studio creations. Even though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices all came out 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 trying to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, demonstrates that that desire stretched back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she blends these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an improviser in total mastery. That's electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering 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

In time, Brubeck call Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies 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 soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation 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 became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – 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 truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove 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 active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling 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 great promise of the internet