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Flipping through the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was best known for making sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she asked for pianos without the cover to facilitate to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if any more recordings existed. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to 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 later 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 attempting to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, demonstrates that that impulse stretched back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates many different sonic associations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist 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 captivated by the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she blends these new sounds with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a body of work extending to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an performer in complete command. This is thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She was given her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she recounted the tale of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Early on, Williams 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 introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later describe Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met 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 "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector riding on the coattails of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field 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

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, settling in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the immense possibilities of the internet