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Perusing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with xeroxed liners, a little bit of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared atypical for Williams, who was best known for making sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – for her concerts, she requested pianos lacking the lid to facilitate to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her releases.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter comments regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if further recordings had been made. She provided four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two live, two made in the studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also shared some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," Potter recounts.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of altered piano works that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships 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 serenity she found through having a spiritual practice all shone through in conversation."

In later 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 musician attempting to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, demonstrates that that drive extended back decades. Rather than a homogenous piano sound, the instrument creates numerous distinct sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars giving way to snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force of her music, but had scant knowledge of her dreamlike prepared piano before this release. Soon after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing 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 artistic antecedents: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how effectively she merges these novel textures with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new psychedelically coloured sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an artist in complete command. It’s exhilarating material.

An Eternal Tinkerer

Williams consistently explored the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she reportedly said. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from beneath the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to her stool. "Requiring percussion, my left foot acted as the hi-hat," she stated.

Early on, Williams studied classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Nevertheless, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before moving backwards to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a strident, public critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, unflinching, openly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Following a period in the active Bay Area scene, she moved through 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 immense possibilities of the internet