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Perusing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, artist Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for producing sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a musical experimenter – at her live shows, she requested pianos without the cover to make it easier to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a dimension that rarely made it on her records.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if further recordings were available. She provided four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two live, two studio creations. And though she had ceased playing publicly years earlier, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," says Potter.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was issued in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "But I think her personality, strength, self-confidence and the peace she found through her spiritual pursuits 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 artist attempting to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano reverberations, shows that that drive reached back decades. In place of a consistent piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and small devices spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with colossal bellows giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was captivated by the force 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, pursuing "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a connection with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the groundbreaking approaches of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she fuses these new sounds with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are driven by the effervescent force of an performer in full control. It’s thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always explored the piano. "Striking keys produced hues in my mind," she noted in an interview. She obtained her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she noted: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she stated.

Initially, Williams trained in classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: the following week, he introduced her to Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Brubeck would later call 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 immersion in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her extensive studies to study 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 disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams met the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the key way of securing work – and of a commercial business riding on the coattails of artists in need.

"I am repeatedly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend 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, honest, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she relocated to smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the great promise of the internet