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While browsing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector keenly focused on the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she asked for pianos with the top removed to make it easier to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to inquire if further recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. And though she had long since retired previously, she also included some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been public about her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think 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) – explicitly categorized "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist attempting to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, reveals that that desire reached back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars collapsing into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but had scant knowledge of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she merges these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a discography extending to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the bubbling vitality of an artist in complete command. This is exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she reportedly said. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she explained.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for embellishing a section. However, he detected her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later describe Williams "one of the greatest 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 knowledge of jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her long journeys to learn about the genre – first, to the more modern styles 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.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "boys’ club," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "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 faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

The artist's trajectory moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active 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 saw early on the great promise of the internet