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While browsing the jazz records at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, artist Kye Potter found a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the classic independent effort. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was personally duplicated, with printed inserts, a dab of fluorescent marker to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. Yet it seemed unusual from Williams, who was best known for producing sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she asked for pianos without the cover to make it easier to get inside and play the strings directly – it was a facet that rarely made it on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two live, two studio creations. Although she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also included some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, midway through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter reveals. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice 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 musician attempting to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, shows that that impulse stretched back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and small devices sparking to life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her otherworldly prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she merges these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she developed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an artist in total mastery. It’s electrifying music.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams had always explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she once explained. She was given her first vertical piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "taking apart" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams took off a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Williams originally learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the traditional pieces led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck describe 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, exhibits her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her dedicated efforts to study 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 rapidly felt disenchanted with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, direct, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans woman. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams understood from the beginning the huge potential of the internet