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Flipping through the jazz records at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter discovered a worn cassette by pianist and composer Jessica Williams. It seemed like the ultimate homemade project. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and released 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. But it appeared unusual from Williams, who was best known for producing vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

While the West Coast scene knew her as a creative innovator – at her live shows, she requested pianos without the cover to facilitate to access the interior and strum the strings – it was a facet that rarely made it on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Therefore, he wrote to Williams to ask if further recordings existed. She sent back four recordings of prepared piano from the mid-80s – two performance tapes, two recorded in a studio. Even though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also shared some recent work. "She sent me around 15 or 16 synth tapes – entire projects," says Potter.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter worked with Williams throughout the pandemic to compile Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, part way through the project. She was seventy-three. "She was struggling physically and financially," Potter says. Williams had been vocal concerning her struggles following spinal surgery in 2012, which meant she could no longer tour, and a cancer diagnosis in 2017. "However, I believe her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through having a spiritual practice all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent synthesizer-driven, rhythm-based releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a artist attempting to transcend convention. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano echoes, reveals that that drive extended back decades. Instead of a uniform piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic evocations: what could be cimbaloms, gamelan, remote carillons, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with colossal bellows collapsing into biting, staccato riffs.

Artistic Recognition

Tortoise’s Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Composer Jessika Kenney, who has worked with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), experienced 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. Soon after witnessing Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, pursuing "the abstract vocalizations of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Today, that appears completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was understood by me then."

Technical Precursors

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: consider John Cage’s modified instruments, or the innovative methods of U.S. maverick Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how successfully she blends these innovative timbres with her own jazzy lexicon at the keyboard. The language rarely departs from that which she honed in a body of work stretching to more than 80 albums, ensuring that the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an artist in total mastery. It’s exhilarating material.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always tinkered with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she reportedly said. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. Through her online journal, she told the story of her first "dismantling" – "a practice I continued for all pianos," she noted: Williams took off 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 wrote.

Early on, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Initial experiences with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she presented his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who chastised her for embellishing a section. Yet he recognized her potential: a week later, he gave her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

In time, Brubeck call Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep immersion 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 working her way back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she quickly became disillusioned 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 forceful, open critic of her scene: of the poor compensation, the jazz "old boys' network," the "typical jazz socializing" – namely smoking and drinking as the main method of landing performances – and of a commercial business profiting from the work of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its inability to organise, communicate and stand up for 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 wide-ranging, unflinching, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a trans individual. 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

The artist's trajectory 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 saw early on the huge potential of the internet