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While browsing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed out of character for Williams, who was most famous for creating lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she requested pianos without the cover to allow her to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if further recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been public about her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness 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 seeking to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, shows that that drive extended back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she merges these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an performer in total mastery. This is electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Early on, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned 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 just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet