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

As a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, 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 albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if additional recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued 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 reveals. Williams had been public about her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through her spiritual pursuits all were evident in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist attempting to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, demonstrates that that desire extended back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, animals rattling around cages, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she fuses these novel textures with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an improviser in full control. That's electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She was given her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Williams originally learned 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 reprimanded her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later describe 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, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, 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 disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged 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 poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for 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, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field 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."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in 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