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Perusing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, collector 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 photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was best known for producing vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she required pianos lacking the lid to allow her to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if further recordings existed. She provided four recordings of modified piano from the 1980s – two live, two studio creations. Even though she had stepped away from public performance years earlier, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – full releases," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter reveals. Williams had been public about her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "Yet I feel her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through meditative practices all shone through in conversation."

In later 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 artist attempting to break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, demonstrates that that desire stretched back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Shortly after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

These modified tones have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how masterfully she merges these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an performer in total mastery. This is electrifying music.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She received her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for altering 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.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to educate herself the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through 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