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While browsing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was most famous for making lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she required pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if further recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. And though she had ceased playing publicly previously, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been public about her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

In later 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 musician trying to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, reveals that that impulse reached back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with massive roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist 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 dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she blends these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she honed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an artist in total mastery. It’s electrifying music.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she wrote.

Initially, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck call 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, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself 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 disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation 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 became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality 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. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "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 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. Subsequent to a stint in the active 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 immense possibilities of the internet