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Perusing the jazz section at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and issued 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 atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if further recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Even though she had long since retired some time before, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, midway through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 musician attempting to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, reveals that that drive reached back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she blends these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new psychedelically coloured sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an artist in complete command. It’s exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She was given her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from below 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.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later describe Williams "a top-tier 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. However, despite her long journeys to learn about 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 soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena 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."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet