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Perusing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he says. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was most famous for producing vibrant jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – for her concerts, she requested pianos with the top removed to facilitate to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two performance tapes, two studio creations. Although she had long since retired previously, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter explains.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the peace she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 musician attempting to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, demonstrates that that desire extended back decades. In place of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, beasts in pens, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how effectively she blends these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs 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 improviser in complete command. That's thrilling stuff.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently tinkered with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She was given her first upright piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams took off a panel from under 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 stated.

Williams originally studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back 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 encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, honest, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased 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."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet