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While browsing the jazz aisle at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – during her performances, she requested pianos without the cover to facilitate to get inside and pluck the strings – it was a dimension that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to see if additional recordings had been made. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Although she had long since retired years earlier, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident in conversation."

In later 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 break free of tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano reverberations, shows that that drive reached back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano until this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she merges these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the fizzy energy of an performer in full control. It’s exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She received her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck call Williams "among the finest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was equally admiring. 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 tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disenchanted 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 senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of landing performances – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"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 stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have endured as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to 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 saw early on the great promise of the internet