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While browsing the jazz aisle at a neighborhood shop a few years ago, producer Kye Potter came across a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

Being a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt out of character for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making sparkling jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a musical experimenter – during her performances, she asked for pianos lacking the lid to make it easier to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her releases.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to ask if additional recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two studio creations. And though she had long since retired years earlier, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – full releases," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams during the Covid pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. Her age was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter states. Williams had been public about her hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the serenity she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 trying to escape expectation. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano echoes, shows that that desire reached back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while being a student 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. Shortly after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the dreamlike quality of improvised singing of the Javanese gamelan," she recalls. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: think of John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how masterfully she fuses these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech scarcely deviates from that which she honed in a body of work spanning more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an performer in total mastery. It’s exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She was given her first upright 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 placed it on the floor alongside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she explained.

Initially, Williams learned 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 reprimanded her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later call Williams "a top-tier 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. Nevertheless, despite her long journeys to learn about 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 soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of securing work – and of a corporate industry profiting from the work of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of essential beliefs," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was broad in scope, direct, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her preferred musical arena 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."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Following a period in the bustling Bay Area scene, she moved through smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later moving smaller still, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet