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Perusing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was most famous for producing lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she requested pianos without the cover to make it easier to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if further recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions 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 reveals. Williams had been public about her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 musician trying to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, shows that that impulse extended back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and tiny engines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars giving way to growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the bubbling vitality of an artist in complete command. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "taking apart" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for embellishing a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck describe Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts 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 met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, decidedly ideological 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 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

Williams’ career moved toward 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 relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet