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Perusing the jazz section at a local record store a few years ago, producer Kye Potter found a battered tape by American pianist Jessica Williams. It looked like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had detached from the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector deeply fascinated by the American musical avant garde post John Cage, Potter was fascinated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt unusual from Williams, who was most famous for making sparkling jazz in the straight-ahead tradition of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she asked for pianos without the cover to make it easier to reach inside and pluck the strings – it was a aspect that rarely made it on her records.

"I had never encountered anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. So he emailed Williams to ask if further recordings were available. She responded with four recordings of prepared piano from the 1980s – two concert recordings, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had long since retired years earlier, she also enclosed some recent work. "She sent me probably 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter recounts.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was issued in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "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 diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her personality, strength, self-confidence and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all were evident 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 artist seeking to escape convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, reveals that that desire reached back decades. In place of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and small devices coughing to start. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with massive roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "stunning, eclectic, adventurous and detailed" record. Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while studying in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the power of her music, but knew little of her dreamlike prepared piano until this release. Shortly after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Currently, that feels completely natural as a relationship with her. I only wish it was known to me then."

Artistic Forebears

These modified tones have historical forerunners: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how masterfully she merges these innovative timbres with her own bluesy vocabulary at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she honed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new hallucinogenically hued sounds are powered by the fizzy energy of an performer in complete command. That's thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Throughout her life, Williams tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She was given her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor beside her stool. "Seeking rhythm, my left foot turned into the hi-hat pedal," she wrote.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who reprimanded her for improvising a section. Yet he recognized her potential: the following week, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

Subsequently, Brubeck describe Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. 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 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 quickly became disillusioned with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Encouraged by the veteran'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 "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of artists in need.

"I am continually disappointed at the nature of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to unite, discuss, and defend a set, any set, of core values," she penned in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. In the same vein, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, unflinching, expressly political and feminist, though she seldom talked about her experiences as a trans individual. As one critic noted: "To add to the sexism … that chased 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."

A Journey of Independence

Williams’ career moved toward self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, making a home in Portland in 1991, and later going to a more remote location, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet