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Flipping through the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by American pianist Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a touch of highlighter to emphasize the artwork, and put out on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector keenly focused on the U.S. experimental scene following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was most famous for making lively jazz in the straight-ahead tradition 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 lacking the lid to allow her to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her albums.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to see if further recordings were available. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two live, two studio creations. Even though she had ceased playing publicly some time before, she also included some contemporary pieces. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter states. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer discovery in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a pianist seeking to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano reverberations, demonstrates that that impulse extended back decades. Instead of a consistent piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, distant church bells, beasts in pens, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with monumental roars dissolving into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the power of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have historical forerunners: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she fuses these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are fueled by the effervescent force of an artist in full control. That's exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. In her writings, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and placed it on the floor next to her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she explained.

Williams originally trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Early encounters with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for improvising a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later refer to Williams "a top-tier 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 absorption in jazz history, plus her trademark playful pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she emerged as a forceful, open 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 securing work – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of fundamental principles," she penned in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Similarly, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she infrequently addressed 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 cruel nonsense she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career 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 going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams recognized early the huge potential of the internet