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While browsing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a worn cassette by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he says. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was most famous for creating sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she required pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if any more recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Although she had long since retired previously, she also included some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter explains.

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, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

In later synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist trying to break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, shows that that drive extended back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Guitarist Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" 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 had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "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 understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she merges these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an improviser in full control. That's exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she once explained. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

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

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later refer to 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, displays her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, decidedly ideological 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 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the immense possibilities of the internet