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Perusing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered 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 personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

For 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 best known for making lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she requested pianos with the top removed to make it easier to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if additional recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two studio creations. And though she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist seeking to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, reveals that that drive extended back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she fuses these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an performer in full control. That's electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Initially, Williams studied 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 chastised her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck describe Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits 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 contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path 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 was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend 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 broad in scope, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender 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 suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet