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While browsing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, artist Kye Potter came across a well-used recording by musician Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he recalls. "It was personally duplicated, with xeroxed liners, a touch of highlighter to accentuate the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

For a collector particularly interested in the avant-garde movement after John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was primarily recognized for creating sparkling jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – for her concerts, she required pianos without the cover to facilitate to access the interior and pluck the strings – it was a facet that infrequently appeared on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to inquire if further recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two studio creations. Although she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synth tapes – full releases," Potter explains.

A Final Collaboration: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her difficulties 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 peace she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent 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 pianist attempting to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its curiously transformed piano echoes, demonstrates that that impulse extended back decades. Rather than a uniform piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic impressions: what could be cimbaloms, Indonesian percussion, remote carillons, beasts in pens, and little machines spluttering into life. It possesses a powerfully immediate energy, with monumental roars giving way to biting, staccato riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker states he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the power of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Williams’ prepared sounds have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What’s striking is how successfully she fuses these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech rarely departs from that which she cultivated in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, so that the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an artist in complete command. That's exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams had always explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She obtained her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she commented: Williams detached a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Early on, Williams studied 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 altering a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Brubeck would later call Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever 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 soon grew disenchanted with the jazz world.

Following her relocation from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams was introduced to the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the veteran's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the meagre pay, the jazz "boys’ club," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of securing work – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of artists in need.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, openly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that drove her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of inhumane bullshit she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career evolved into self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the active 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 understood from the beginning the great promise of the internet