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Flipping through the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she required pianos without the cover to allow her to access the interior and play the strings directly – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if further recordings were available. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two made in the studio. Although she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also enclosed some contemporary pieces. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. But Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based 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 transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, reveals that that desire stretched back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano until this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an performer in complete command. It’s exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She obtained her first home 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 set it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she stated.

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

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck refer to 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, exhibits her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her extensive studies to study the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating 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 became a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of getting gigs – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. As one critic noted: "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 arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the bustling Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet