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While browsing the jazz aisle at a local record store a few years ago, collector Kye Potter came across a battered tape by musician Jessica Williams. It looked like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had come off the tape," he notes. "It was home-dubbed, with printed inserts, a little bit of highlighter to highlight the artwork, and released on her own label, Ear Art."

Being 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 atypical for Williams, who was most famous for producing lively jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

Although the California jazz community knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she asked for pianos with the top removed to facilitate to get inside and strum the strings – it was a dimension that seldom found its way on her releases.

"I'd never heard anything like it," Potter states regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if further recordings existed. She responded with four recordings of modified piano from the mid 1980s – two live, two recorded in a studio. And though she had stepped away from public performance some time before, she also shared some newer material. "She sent me approximately 15 or 16 synthesizer recordings – complete albums," Potter explains.

A Posthumous Project: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams throughout the pandemic to put together Blue Abstraction, an album of prepared piano pieces that was published in late 2025. However, Williams died in 2022, part way through the project. She was 73. "She was facing health and money problems," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her hardships after spinal surgery in 2012, which prevented her from tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the calmness she found through meditative practices all came out 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 artist attempting to escape tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its fascinatingly modified piano resonances, demonstrates that that desire stretched back decades. Rather than a consistent piano sound, the piano creates a multitude of sonic associations: what could be hammered dulcimers, gamelan, distant church bells, creatures in enclosures, and little machines sparking to life. It possesses a tremendously urgent energy, with colossal bellows dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Listener Praise

Guitarist Jeff Parker expresses he is a fan of this "gorgeous, diverse, exploratory and nuanced" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has collaborated with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), heard Williams play while attending school in Seattle in the 1990s, and was drawn to the force of her music, but was largely unaware of her surreal-sounding prepared piano before this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, seeking "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she says. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Technical Precursors

These modified tones have artistic antecedents: reflect on John Cage’s prepared pianos, or the innovative methods of idiosyncratic composer Henry Cowell. What is remarkable is how effectively she fuses these novel textures with her own soulful language at the keyboard. Her musical speech hardly ever strays from that which she developed in a discography spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the bubbling vitality of an improviser in total mastery. That's thrilling stuff.

A Constant Innovator

Williams had always experimented with the piano. "When I played, I visualized colors," she once explained. She received her first home piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "disassembling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she noted: Williams removed a panel from below the piano’s keyboard, and put it on the floor next to 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. Youthful exposures with the classical repertoire led her to Rachmaninov; she brought his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for altering a section. But he saw her potential: a week later, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She figured out his Take Five within a week.

Jazz World Disillusionment

In time, Brubeck describe Williams "one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was just as awed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, exhibits her deep knowledge of jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. Yet, despite her long journeys to study the genre – first, to the more modern styles of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she soon grew disillusioned with the jazz world.

After moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Inspired by the elder pianist's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she became a forceful, open critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "male-dominated sphere," the "scene networking" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a profit-driven sector benefiting from the efforts of struggling artists.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the truth of the ‘jazz world’ and its failure to coordinate, express, and advocate for a set, any set, of core values," she wrote in the sleeve text to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was eclectic, honest, decidedly ideological and feminist, though she infrequently addressed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her chosen artistic field for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

The Path to Self-Sufficiency

The artist's trajectory arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the active Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the huge potential of the internet