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Perusing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a battered tape by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was most famous for creating vibrant jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she required pianos with the top removed to allow her to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that seldom found its way on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to inquire if any more recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. And though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter collaborated with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter states. Williams had been public about her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 break free of convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, reveals that that desire reached back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, animals rattling around cages, and little machines coughing to start. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she blends these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a discography stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an artist in complete command. This is exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She received her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she commented: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck 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. Nevertheless, despite her extensive studies to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Her professional path evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the huge potential of the internet