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Perusing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "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."

As a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed atypical for Williams, who was most famous for making lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she asked for pianos with the top removed to facilitate to get inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if any more recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also included some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams during the Covid pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through her spiritual pursuits all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – defiantly tagged "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician trying to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, demonstrates that that desire stretched back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but knew little of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she fuses these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an improviser in complete command. This is thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She received her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from beneath 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 learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

In time, 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, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way 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 failure to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet