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While browsing the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a well-used recording by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It appeared like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he notes. "It was copied at home, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was intrigued by a tape titled Prepared Piano. But it appeared out of character for Williams, who was most famous for creating lively jazz in the conventional style of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the west coast jazz circuit knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she asked for pianos without the cover to allow her 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 inquire if additional recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of altered piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two studio creations. Even though she had long since retired previously, she also included some recent work. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away 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 hardships following spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "But I think her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through meditative practices all were evident in conversation."

In her subsequent 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 musician attempting to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, shows that that drive stretched back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the instrument creates many different sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, animals rattling around cages, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with massive roars collapsing into snarling, highly punctuated riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the force of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Soon after seeing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Historical Influences

Her altered piano techniques have historical forerunners: reflect on John Cage’s modified instruments, or the groundbreaking approaches of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she fuses these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach scarcely deviates from that which she cultivated in a catalog stretching to more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are powered by the effervescent force of an performer in total mastery. This is exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently explored the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she noted in an interview. She received her first home piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "something I repeated for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from beneath 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 explained.

Williams originally trained in 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 chastised her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She learned his Take Five within a week.

Industry Disappointment

Subsequently, Brubeck describe 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, shows her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her signature clever pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to educate herself the genre – first, to the hipper sounds of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

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

"I remain constantly disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the album notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was eclectic, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A writer pointed out: "To add to the sexism … that pushed her from her preferred musical arena for a period, imagine what kind of terrible treatment she must have faced as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

Her professional path moved toward self-sufficiency. Subsequent to a stint in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she moved through 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